Set Yourself On Fire
by TerraBeth
Summary: My attempt to deal with Season Five. Read only if your sympathies lie with Serena and Chuck, because Blair and Dan are not going to be treated kindly by this story.
1. Your Ex Lover is Dead

**"When there's nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire" - Stars, "Your Ex-Lover is Dead"**

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><p>He finally finds her in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall. It's dark in the room, and it's only because of the gray winter light leeching through the blinds that he can make out her silhouette. She is sitting on the edge of the bed, huddled down over her knees; she is pressing her hands to her face. She is sobbing so hard that her chest is shaking up and down, so hard that she has to fight against her sobbing to breathe. After one mighty gasp, she lets out a long, drawn-out, wounded sound that hurts his heart to hear.<p>

He approaches her, and, after a moment's hesitation, touches her softly on the back. She jerks away as if his hand has burned her and stares up at him with reddened eyes.

"Sorry, Serena," he quickly says. "I didn't mean to startle you. I just saw that you were missing, and…"

He trails off, feeling like an intruder to her pain. Like any other of the funeral guests currently crowding the van der Woodsen apartment, eating canapés and gossiping under their breath about the family inheritance.

"It's okay," she chokes out, wiping at her eyes and cheeks with the flats of her fingers.

He shifts his weight from foot to foot. "If you want to be alone, I understand," he offers in a low voice.

He hopes against hope that she won't ask him to leave. Not yet. Because he does not want to walk out of this room, does not want to make his way through the crowd towards the door.

Not with _them_ there.

Serena's face twists, her chin trembles, and she looks up at him and shakes her head several times—_no_, _no, no_—and without another word he sits down on the bed next to her and takes her into his arms.

She lets out a soft, grateful moan and presses her face into his shoulder. He can feel her fingertips digging into his back, her hot wet tears on the side of his neck. He closes his eyes and rocks her torso back and forth, losing himself in the sway and pitch of their concordant bodies.

Several minutes go by, and he's no longer sure who's comforting whom.

"She didn't have to come here with _him_," Serena suddenly mutters into his shoulder. "Did you see them?" She swallows hard. "They were _holding hands_. They were _smiling_."

He tightens his jaw and says nothing.

"I tried so hard to understand," she whispers against his neck. "I tried so hard to be…_okay_. But I don't, and I can't. I just…can't." Her body starts to shake in anger, and her voice rises to a higher pitch. "_How could she do this to me_?" she cries. "How could she do this to _you_?"

Chuck blinks back tears. "I don't know, Serena," he answers in a tight voice. "I just…I don't know."

He'd agonized over the same question for several sleepless nights. He had tortured himself, thinking over everything he'd ever done, anything that could have warranted this. He had tried to figure out why Blair's love for him had simply disappeared.

And finally, finally, he'd come to the realization that there was no use in trying to make sense of it. Because it just didn't make any sense.

"I don't even know who she is anymore," Serena says in a flat, despairing voice. "I feel like…" She pauses. "The Blair I loved is _gone_," she whimpers, and begins to cry again.

He strokes her back as she sobs into his shoulder.

He'd thought that Serena was in love with Dan. He'd assumed that this was what had wounded her so deeply. The incontrovertible evidence that her first true love just didn't love her anymore.

But now he realizes that he was wrong.

Blair's the one who's broken her heart. Just like she's broken his.

"Stay with me, Chuck," she begs him, tightening her arms around his body. "Stay with me until everyone else leaves." She wipes her eyes on his shoulder like a small child. "Please."

"Of course I'll stay," he whispers to her. And then adds, with a sad little smile, "Where else do I have to be?"

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><p><strong>AN: I'm sorry to say that I've lost my inspiration to continue my C/B fics in light of the fuckery that is currently the show. I can only hope that everything that's happened post 5x10 is some horrible coma nightmare of Chuck's. Or maybe the entire season is Dan's fanfiction of a novel. I have no idea! Either way, I am tired of seeing Blair behave like a complete lunatic, Dan act like a complete douche, and Chuck and Serena suffering heartbreak after heartbreak week after week after week. Thus, this fanfic. **

**It will not be as complicated as my other multichapters. More like a series of Chuck and Serena scenes than a fully worked-out narrative.**** I have some general ideas for what I want to happen but I am open to suggestions from the reading public (that's you), so feel free to leave reviews. It is also unbetaed, because my beta is asleep. (Sorry, M! But email me if you have any suggestions!)**

**Maybe when this season ends I'll find the inspiration to finish Criminal, but at this point I just can't do it, even though it's AU. Sorry guys.**

****I will always, always want Chuck and Blair to be together...but not this version of Blair, who pledged her eternal love to Chuck only to marry another man in front of him, and then fall in love with yet another man three episodes later. I just can't do it. If that makes me a bad shipper, so be it.****


	2. Foolish

"**I remember DC/ I remember wanting you to laugh again / I remember how foolish I was"-Superchunk, "Foolish"**

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><p>He lifts a forkful of risotto to his mouth and begins to chew. Almost immediately, he feels his gorge rise, and he forces himself to choke it down in spite of his incipient nausea.<p>

He sets his fork down on the tablecloth. He hasn't been able to eat a full meal for several days.

There's a sort of cloud enveloping him. It covers him like a blanket. It mutes everything. The taste of food. His ability to think. Even the nettling voice of Lily's viper of a sister, he thinks, shooting an annoyed glance at Carol across the table.

It mutes everything but the pain. Weed's the only thing that really helps with that.

Underneath the table, he feels Serena nudge his knee with her knee, and he glances sideways at her. She gestures with her eyes towards his abandoned food, and a little furrow of concern appears between her eyebrows. He smiles at her sadly and gives an almost imperceptible nod towards her own untouched plate.

She gives him a little shrug. As if to say, _you know how it is_.

He does.

When Carol's voice rises in volume, he forces himself to tune back into the conversation; he tries to make some sense of the stream of vitriol that is flowing from her mouth.

Something about "that bitch Ivy Dickens." Something about her brainwashing Cece. Something about how they'd have to be insane not to contest the will.

"Or _stupid_," Carol hisses, giving Lily a pointed look.

Chuck frowns.

"Carol, do we really have to decide on a course of legal action right now?" Lily says. She is cradling her temple in her hand. "Because I think I've had enough trials for one week."

"The longer we wait, the more likely she is to take the money and run," Carol replies. "Is that what you want?"

"Of course not," Lily says in an exhausted voice, and she looks paler than Chuck's ever seen her—at least, since the night his father died—and he feels a sudden surge of ferocity on her behalf.

"You're the one who hired Ivy to impersonate your daughter in the first place," he says to Carol in his tone of deepest contempt. "You tried to scam the family out of millions of dollars. You're the reason everyone's in this mess. So you can just lay the fuck off, as far as I'm concerned."

Across the table, Erik shoots him a look of consummate approval.

Carol balks at him for a moment, blinking, then swivels her head to look at her sister. "Lily," she says in a cold, cordial tone, "can you please tell me what your ex-husband's son is doing here? We agreed it would only be _family_."

A loud CRASH suddenly reverberates through the dining room of the restaurant. Everyone is startled into open-mouthed silence—everyone except Lola, who lets out a little cry of surprise.

A shattered pile of glass lies in a puddle on the floor next to Serena's chair.

She is sitting there, frozen; her hand is still suspended mid-air, still curved in the shape of the drinking glass that slid through it seconds earlier. She is staring at Carol with fire in her eyes.

"He _IS_ family," she seethes through bared teeth, as her fingers curl into a first. "Because he _acts_ like family. Unlike some other people I could mention!"

Without another word, she shoves her chair back from the table (it screeches against the floor) and swings her purse over her shoulder.

"_Serena_," Lily says.

"I'm sorry, Mom, but I can't stay here with her for another second," Serena quickly explains. "I'll wait outside for you, okay?" She begins to walk towards the door.

"Serena, wait," Chuck says, and she does. He balls up his napkin and tosses it onto his plate. "I'll come with you."

"God, I hate her," she complains to him as they step outside the restaurant. "And after everything that's happened this week…" She shakes her head, overcome. "I just couldn't take any more. You know?"

Instead of answering, Chuck pulls a joint out of the inside pocket of his blazer and casually lifts it to his lips. He can feel Serena's eyes upon him as he lights it and blows out a little cloud of smoke.

"Wait…is that what I think it is?" she asks, conspiratorial glee in her voice. He doesn't answer, just shoots her a look and strolls off the street into the alley beside the restaurant.

"Give it," she orders him when he finally comes to a stop behind the dumpsters. She reaches out towards him with two fingers pointed into a V.

In response he playfully lifts the joint out of her reach and then takes another drag on it.

Serena rolls her eyes at him. "Puff, puff, pass, Bass," she recites with a little smile. "Remember that?"

He chuckles and hands it over. "How could I forget? I just thought you'd reformed."

"Chuck, I dated Nate, remember?" she reminds him, raising the joint to her lips.

"I never saw you smoking up with him."

She blows out a little puff of smoke. "And yet we were constantly baking brownies." She quirks an eyebrow at him as she passes him the joint.

"Aha."

"I stopped _smoking_ junior year," she explains. "Because of Dan. He didn't _approve_."

She pauses. "Motherfucker. I was so stupid to think—"

She cuts herself off.

Chuck eyes her thoughtfully for a moment. "I could have him killed, you know," he offers.*****

Serena huffs, and he thinks for a moment that she's scolding him, but then she says with an exaggerated hopeful sigh, "Could you?"

They laugh together.

"No, really," she says, grinning, and they laugh again. Uproariously. Already a bit giddy from the effects of the weed. And, standing there with Serena in an alley strewn with garbage and bits of waterlogged food, Chuck realizes that he can't even remember the last time he laughed like this.

It must have been back in high school.

"Remember when we used to get high in the darkroom sophomore year?" Serena reminisces, passing him the joint. She smiles. "God, we were such stupid kids back then."

There is nostalgia in her tone, but Chuck feels an unpleasant lurch in his stomach.

"Serena," he says in a slow, deliberate voice. He inhales on the joint, holding his hand over the lower half of his face as he does so. "I'm…"

He breathes out; he drops his voice. "I'm sorry about that, by the way."

"Sorry for what?"

"You know." He pushes his shoulders forward into a shrug. "Everything that happened. Before you went to boarding school. And…after."

She looks at him for a moment, her lips slightly parted. "I forgave you a long time ago for that," she murmurs.

He nods in acknowledgment. And gratitude.

"You know, sometimes I can't believe how much you've changed," she says, shaking her head as she lifts the joint to her lips.

Chuck swallows down the lump that rises in the back of his throat. "It was Blair," he croaks. "She's the one who changed me."

"No, Chuck," Serena contradicts him. "It was you. No one changes anyone else. Not unless they want to change."

"She made me _want_ to change." His voice is bitter and cold. "To be a better man. And look what good it's done me."

"You don't have Blair anymore," she says sadly. "That's true."

He doesn't say anything. Just looks up at her with wounded eyes, and takes a deep pull on the joint.

"But you're still good," Serena says, her voice rising hopefully on the last syllable.

He is looking at her with belief dawning in his eyes when he spots Lily coming around the corner, and he quickly twists his arm behind his back to hide the joint.

"_There_ you two are," Lily announces. She walks up to them, her heels clicking against the pavement. "What on earth are you doing standing around in this filthy alley?" she wants to know.

Chuck looks at Serena for help.

"Oh, you know…just talking," Serena says a bit too breezily. She steps forward and tries to take her mother by the arm. "You're right, though….this is a stupid place to stand around," she rambles. "Let's go."

Lily emits a knowing sort of cough and brushes Serena's hand off of her arm. "Oh, Serena," she says to her, amused. "You must really think I'm stupid."

She holds out her hand towards Chuck. "Hand it over."

"Aww, mom," Serena says in a disappointed voice, as Chuck begins to cough out an enormous cloud of smoke.

Lily waggles her fingers at him, and, eyes watering, he passes her the joint.

"You two really should know better," she says, daintily plucking it from his fingers.

Then she raises it to her own lips, and inhales. And they gape at her. Speechless.

"_What_?" she says, after blowing out an elegant, thin stream of smoke. "I followed a grunge band on tour during the early nineties. You can't honestly be that surprised."

They continue to stare at Lily in overt admiration as she takes another drag.

"Hey," Chuck suddenly says in a hoarse voice, having just realized something. "Where _is_ Rufus? Jeanette at the front desk said he never checked into the Empire."

Lily's lips press together into a thin, angry dart. "He's staying in Brooklyn for the time being," she says in a short voice.

"I didn't know that," Serena says, surprised, as Chuck raises an eyebrow.

"We had a disagreement," Lily says, as if she's trying to end the conversation there, but they just stare at her—mostly because they're stoned, but also because they're curious, and she finally raises her eyes to the sky in exasperation and blows a another stream of smoke into the air.

"Let's just say that I did not approve of him _actively encouraging_ his son to pursue a relationship with one Blair Grimaldi, née Waldorf," she says, crossing her arms over her chest. "Who not only has a complicated history with my son, but also happens to be my daughter's best friend." She shakes her head angrily. "I don't know what the hell he was thinking."

"You don't have to apologize for him, Mom," Serena says quietly.

Lily tosses the roach aside and steps closer towards them. She raises her arms; she sets her hands atop their shoulders.

"Listen to me for a minute," she says, lifting her hands to touch their faces. "You two are _beautiful people_. And if anyone out there doesn't realize how lucky they are to have your affection, your _love_…" She pauses. "Then they're aren't worth another _second_ of your time."

Chuck opens his mouth to speak.

"They're _not_," Lily reiterates vehemently.

With a shiver, she begins to rub her shoulders through her rabbit fur coat. "It's cold out here," she says, and gestures with her head towards the street. "Let's get back to the Empire, shall we? Erik's probably already hailed us a cab."

"Okay," Serena says with quiet satisfaction, and Chuck agrees, "Sure," and together they walk out of the alley down the block towards the cab waiting at the intersection.

Midway there, Serena intertwines her arm with Chuck's. She twists her forearm up to clasp him closer to her; she lets her head touch down on his shoulder.

And Chuck thinks to himself with a smirk, _wow_. She really _is_ high.

He kind of wants to make a joke at Serena's expense. Tease her, tell her she's a lightweight. But the sensation of having someone so close to him is nice, and he doesn't want her to let go of his arm just yet.

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><p><strong>*<strong> He actually could.

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><p><strong>AN: Many thanks to my beta, Maribells. You should go check out her current multichapter, "Stay or Leave,"if you haven't already. We're both trying to deal with the fuckery of S5, but our stories are ultimately going to be very different, I think.**

**I didn't watch the episode last night (I would rather watch my parents having sex than watch Dan and Blair together), so some of this is going to be AU. I hear that Lola is acting like a total biatch, but she's not nearly so haughty in my story, although I'm not sure what I'm going to do with her character yet. And Lily and Serena are going to be staying at the Empire. There is no way in hell Serena is going to stick around Blair's penthouse after Blair starts schtupping Dan Humphrey.**

**So apparently Blair suddenly decided that she wasn't in love with Chuck anymore, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I am skeptical that the writers have any plans to try to explain this in a way that is remotely satisfactory, so I might try my hand at it in an upcoming chapter. **

**I am also planning on writing a chapter that shows the dynamic of pre-pilot Blair, Chuck and Serena.**

**Thanks for the reviews, guys, and keep the suggestions coming! It's times like these that we really need fanfic. :) And for comic relief, I also recommend reading the comments people leave on Gossip Girl's facebook page ("dans hair...wtf" was my favorite one today. Last I saw it had 16 likes.)**


	3. Being Boring

"**We were never feeling bored/Cause we were never being boring" –Pet Shop Boys, "Being Boring"**

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><p>Serena van der Woodsen is forty-one years old. She is still just as charming as she was as a teenager, her smile is just as radiant, and she is beautiful in the way that only a woman who has been beautiful her entire life can be.<p>

One spring evening, she is attending a charity event on the Upper East Side. She is walking down a hallway, chatting with the head of the foundation, and a trio of teenagers, two boys and a girl, dart past them towards the balcony outside. They are snickering and nudging each other. One of the boys sets his hand on the girl's waist and pulls her closer towards him, whispers into her ear; she makes a witty quip in return, and the other boy laughs, and they all continue out onto the balcony together, obviously up to no good.

The woman at Serena's side clacks her tongue in disapproval, and says something about teenagers and their lack of manners nowadays, and in a flash Serena remembers a night from her youth, a night when she and Chuck were brooding over Dan and Blair—God, it was _twenty years _ago, she thinks in disbelief—and they went out dancing with Nate.

She remembers sitting in front of the television with Chuck, legs folded underneath her, nursing a gin and tonic, and Nate coming into the room and turning off the television and telling them I _know,_ I _know_, it _sucks_, but it was about time they stopped sitting at home night after night being boring, "especially _you_, Chuck. Seriously, you're twenty-one-years old and you've been acting like you're forty." She remembers Chuck looking insulted and asking Nate what exactly he had in mind and Nate grinning and saying, "Let's go clubbing," and she remembers feeling a burst of excitement in her chest that told her _yes_, Nate was right, she was ready to go have some fun.

She remembers the dress she wore, black jersey with crisscrossing straps in the back and cut up to _here_, and the boots, suede and up to the thigh; Chuck and Nate shooting her looks of approval when they picked her up from her room at the Empire; pre-partying in the limo; the bouncer at the club lifting the red rope in front of them; the red curtains inside the club, the gleaming oak of the bar, the dance floor, already packed with taut, sweating bodies; Chuck leaving them to go talk to a red-haired girl whom he seemed to know well and then returning and discreetly pressing a pill into her palm and into Nate's palm, Nate calling out "one, two, three!" and all of them dropping their pills together, washing them down with a shot of tequila, and heading out onto the floor to dance dance _dance_.

She remembers going to the bathroom an hour later and looking in the mirror and seeing that her eyes are BLACK, there are only thin rings of iris around her dilated pupils, and pressing her hands into her flushed cheeks and laughing at how beautiful she is with her bright black eyes, then heading back on to the floor and seeing Chuck and Nate and knowing by their eyes and smiles that they're rolling just as hard as she is. She remembers dancing with Chuck and Nate, Chuck in front of her, Nate behind her, their bodies tightly pressing together, dancing in ways that would seem strange to all of them were they not all rolling in the deep, were synapses not firing off like Roman candles in their brains, were they not all brimming over with seemingly fathomless love for each other. She remembers feeling the music in every cell of her body, the thumping bass; shouting the lyrics to all the songs that she knows; Chuck lifting a bottle to her lips and encouraging her to drink water, lots of water, because they have been dancing for more than two hours and their clothes are drenched with sweat, and taking the bottle and pouring the rest of the water over her head to cool herself down.

She remembers the DJ spinning a glorious track that sends the entire crowd on the dance floor into a frenzy of motion, a track that feels like ecstasy distilled into sound and rhythm, a track that feels like being in the center of the sun, and suddenly she is too happy to dance, so happy that all she can do is jump up and down, her wet hair whipping out behind her head like a comet's tail; Nate grinning ear to ear, Nate taking off his shirt and spinning it around his head, Nate hugging everyone in sight, Nate bellowing in a voice of utter rapture, "OH MY GOD I FEEL LIKE JESUS!" (a moment that she and Chuck will reference for years to come whenever they want to make fun of Nate, which is often); Chuck spontaneously kissing her, not a romantic kiss, nor a sexy one, because they're on another plane of existence right now, a place like heaven, a place where there is no romance, no sex, only innocence, which is why when Chuck breaks the kiss and lets his forehead rest against hers she simply closes her eyes and smiles, and they sway back and forth for a moment until Nate stops bouncing long enough to kiss both of them in turn, and they all laugh, and there is no feeling of panic, no worry that anything between the three of them has changed, only a feeling that she imagines must be like taking communion for the very first time, knowing with absolute certainty that you are cleansed of all fear, all bitterness, all guilt, and there are no longer any obstacles left between yourself and God—except she doesn't need God. All she needs is Chuck and Nate, because right now they are a trinity of souls that are loving and gentle and pure, and she knows that no harm can possibly come to them as long as they're together.

She remembers leaving the club and running down the street arm-in-arm with both boys; watching all of the lights of Manhattan streak by through the window of the limo; sneaking past the front desk of the Empire into the elevator, where they are so fascinated by their reflections in its mirrored panels that they stand there for a good ten minutes before Chuck remembers to press the button; walking into the penthouse and darting off to the bathroom and pulling her sweat-drenched dress over her head, taking the most glorious shower of her life (she stays in there for a good forty-five minutes), toweling off (which feels equally amazing) and putting on a pair of Chuck's silk pajamas (which feel so good against her skin that she thinks she's never experienced any greater pleasure in her life).

She remembers coming out and seeing Chuck rubbing Monkey behind the ears, cooing to him about what a good boy he is (Monkey's tail is wagging so fast it _blurs_); Nate having the bright idea of taking Chuck's king-size mattress out to the deck so that they can lie down on it to watch the sunrise, all three of them trying and failing to get the mattress out onto the deck, having to call the front desk to send two security guards up to help them get the mattress out onto the deck, Chuck tipping the security guards five hundred dollars each, all three of them finally flopping down on the mattress outside in a big lazy dogpile (Monkey lies down at their feet); Nate rolling a joint that they pass around in a triangle, smoking up to ease the come-down; sharing the comforters because it's still kind of cold outside; Nate massaging her back, digging his thumbs into the muscles behind her shoulder blades; her scratching Nate's head and scratching Chuck's head at the same time, and hearing both of them groan in amazement at how good it feels.

And when the sun finally _does_ come up, Nate is off at the other end of the deck, still not wearing a shirt, and obviously having a spiritual moment, since he is doing what appears to be an improvised form of Tai Chi, and Chuck is lying on his back on the mattress, and she is lying with her head on his stomach, which is rising and falling with the rhythm of his breathing, and his hand is idly combing through her hair, and they are both looking up at the sky, and then a streak of pink suddenly appears over the horizon, and he says to her, "The sun's coming up" in a reverent tone, as if he's _surprised_ that the sun's coming up, as if the universe has already shown them enough largesse for one lifetime and the additional gift of another day is just too astounding to believe.

And then Nate comes back to them with wide eyes and tells them that he's realized something about the afterlife, about how heaven is like a cleansing fire that burns away everything that separates you from everyone else, and about how after you die you never feel sad, lonely, or scared again, and he tells this to them in one long unbroken sentence and they agree with every word he says because it's so beautiful that it can't not be true. And then they wonder out loud whether or not to order room service, but they are _so_ not hungry, and so they just lie down watching the sky grow lighter and lighter and talking to each other until their words are nothing more than dazed murmurs and they finally succumb to sleep, Serena between Chuck and Nate, Nate's arm slung lazily over her waist, her head against Chuck's shoulder, and when she wakes up around noon she pulls herself up and looks at the sweet faces of her friends. They are sleeping like children with their limbs curled up and their mouths open against their pillows, and she feels so much affection towards them that she thinks for a moment that her heart might burst, and she realizes that she is happier than she can remember being for a long, long time.

All of this comes back to forty-one year-old Serena in a singular flash. For a second she almost loses the ability to breathe. She is brimming over with the beauty of this memory.

She mumbles something to the woman beside her that makes it sound as though she agrees with her, but she does not disapprove of the three teenagers, not in the slightest. She is _happy _for them—no, more than that, she is _grateful_, because she is remembering her twenty-one-year-old self. She is remembering Chuck and Nate. She is remembering how much she loved being young.

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><p><strong>AN: Okay, show of hands...who thinks that the writers could do WAY more with Nate than they do?**

**Thanks to Maribells for the beta-ing, and thanks for the reviews, guys. I am thinking that Dan and Blair will be in the next chapter. Chuck and Serena can't avoid them forever.**


	4. Let the Poison Spill From Your Throat

**"Some people get bit from the inside/When they talk it's cold and sour/And no, there's nothing they can do now/They've had their way too many times"-The Faint, "Let the Poison Spill From Your Throat"**

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><p>Blair sits cross-legged in Dan's bed, looking down at the phone that she holds in the palm of her hand.<p>

The photo is of a crowded dance floor. In the foreground, a shirtless, smiling Nate is floating in the air, mid-jump. His eyes are closed, his hair is sweaty, and he is swinging his arms over his head; they blur like angel's wings. Behind him, Serena has her arm slung over Chuck's shoulders; her eyeliner is smudged; she is laughing an open-mouthed laugh that shows all of her teeth. He is saying something to her; his mouth is against her ear. He is turned away from the camera, and his face is half-obscured by Serena's wild hair, but somehow Blair knows he is smiling in that wicked way of his.

**Spotted**, the blast reads. **Chuck Bass at Fat Black Pussycat with Nate Archibald and Serena van der Woodsen. My, my, don't they look ecstatic, B? I was expecting to see C with a lady on each arm just to spite you, but knowing that he's rolling with your eX-best friend Might Do More Actual damage.**

Blair's eyes float over the picture in a way that suggests she has looked at it many times before. Her eyes skip over the three figures in its center, touching down here, there, moving from face to face, and finally settling on the thin sliver of space between the body of her ex-lover and the body of her ex-best friend. The place where Serena's gown puckers inward, where Chuck's hand is cupping her side.

"What are you looking at?"

Startled, she looks up at Dan, who is standing by the bedroom door. He leans forward and plants his hand against the frame.

"Nothing," she says, as she turns the phone off and tosses it across the bed. "Shoes."

Dan tilts his head to one side like a bird.

"Uh…so, was it shoes, or nothing?" he asks with equal parts judgment and disbelief.

When Blair doesn't reply, he continues, "Or was it that Gossip Girl blast from last weekend, _again_?"

Blair opens her mouth, searching for words. But, none forthcoming, she settles for a guilty sort of sigh.

"Blair, you do realize that Chuck and Serena only did this to get your attention," Dan says with absolute confidence. "To make you feel like you're missing out on some…" (he pauses for a moment to exhale) "…a_maz_ing—"

"I don't," Blair insists. "Why would I want to take illegal drugs and writhe around with a bunch of sweaty strangers on a dance floor?"

She pauses, and sweetens her tone. "I have you," she says, looking up at him with warmth in her brown eyes.

Dan smiles, but his eyes look as though they're made of glass.

"I wanted to ask if you wanted some orange juice," he says.

"No thanks, water is fine," she says.

Dan leaves the room, and she sighs as she watches him go. She is so lucky to have such a sweet boyfriend, she thinks to herself. She thinks it as loudly as possible, so that the words will sink down from her brain into her body and become genuine emotion, and for a moment she does feel something stirring inside of her, something that almost resembles happiness. But this ephemeral feeling only lasts until she realizes that Dan will probably fetch her water from the tap, at which point a mixture of disgust and disdain bubbles up from someplace deep inside of her, some neglected, cobwebbed corner of her soul.

She shoves the feeling back into the place from which it came.

Note to self, she says to herself with determination that borders on mania. I will stop lying to Dan. New and improved Blair Waldorf does not lie. Does not manipulate. Does not scheme. New Blair Waldorf does not have to do those things, because new Blair Waldorf simply _is_ and is loved.

Almost immediately a faint voice rises from that neglected, cobwebbed corner of her soul.

_But but but_, it says in response. It's so hard not to lie when he asks her if she minds the flannel sheets on his bed or the stench of Rufus's chili permeating the loft or the rust-colored water that comes out of the bathroom faucet for a few seconds after you turn it on. Or the hipsters in his creative writing seminar, who camp out at Zuccotti Park and hold up signs about the wicked 1% and throw parties in cramped apartments where everyone drinks PBR and white girls with dreadlocks complain about the gentrification in their neighborhoods with no sense of irony whatsoever. And it's so hard not to nudge him under the table when he picks up the wrong fork at brunch with her mother, or repress the impulse to roll her eyes at him when he looks at her with muted disapproval whenever she makes a cutting comment about a society girl walking past in last season's wedges, or when he changes the subject when she brings up the article she's just read about the global fashion market in _Vogue_—

"Breakfast is served!" Dan declares, and sets a wooden tray down in her lap.

Blair looks down at the plate. Blinks.

"You made me…" She nudges one with a fork to confirm. "Potatoes." She enunciates the word with a desperate attempt at gaiety.

"The house special. Home fries à la Humphrey." He stabs one with her fork and lifts it to her mouth. Looking unsure, Blair opens her mouth and accepts the morsel. Chews it tentatively.

Dan raises an eyebrow, expectant.

"Mmm. So good," Blair says with a tight-lipped smile that doesn't reach her eyes.

_Fuck!_ she thinks in a fit of self-anger. _I _will_ stop lying to Dan. _

_Tomorrow_, she modifies. After all, she's already fucked up twice, and it's not even noon yet. Since today is already ruined, she may as well give herself a pass.

_Tomorrow is another day._

"Sooooo…" Dan says with his lips pursed into a circle, crossing the room to his closet. "For tonight, I was thinking this tie, with this shirt." He holds them up over her chest. "Whaddya think?"

Blair smiles and blinks. "I think you'll look great, sweetie," she lies through her teeth.

While Dan is returning the hanger to the closet, she sneaks a double handful of home fries into his pillowcase.

#

"Hey," Chuck says with a note of surprise in his voice.

Serena has suddenly appeared in the mirror behind him, framed by the door to his bedroom. She is wearing an evening gown in mint silk; it has tiny, delicate pleats at the waist and an asymmetrical hem that shows off her legs in the front.

He stands still at the mirror for a few seconds, his gaze panning over her reflected image, before his fingers once again begin to move at his neck, knotting the strip of amethyst fabric into a bow.

"Nice dress," he finally says, finishing the tie.

"What do you think of the shoes?" she asks, with a hint of worry in her tone, and walks over towards him, the hem of her gown fluttering around her ankles.

Chuck turns around. His eyes dart down to her feet, which are strapped into a glittery pair of Jimmy Choo platform pumps.

He smirks. "They suit you," he says.

"So you don't mind them?"

"Why would I?"

"They're four and half inch heels, Chuck."

"So?" He's starting to get confused.

She edges forward to stand next to him. "I'm taller than you," she mutters, proving it by her proximity. Their eyes meet in the mirror, Chuck's three inches lower than Serena's.

"I don't care," he says to her reflection.

It's true. He doesn't.

"A lot of guys don't like that," she explains. "Standing next to a girl who's towering over them…."

She trails off, and Chuck knows exactly whom she means by 'a lot of guys.'

He shrugs. "You're my emergency date," he says with a hint of dark humor. "You can wear whatever shoes you want. I also happen to like them," he adds truthfully. The shoes are decadent, over-the-top. They are something Blair Waldorf would never wear.

The old Blair Waldorf, anyway.

"So…" she says, and sits on the edge of the bed. "Are you going to tell me what happened with the Chanel model or not?"

Chuck tightens his jaw.

A few days ago, he had let it slip that he was going on a second date with a Chanel model, and after Serena had raised her eyebrows and _ooo_ed at him and pressed him for details, he had told her a little bit more about Carissa. About the thick dark hair that she wears long, down past the center of her back. About the Mississippi accent that lengthens her vowels after she has a couple of drinks. About her ambitions beyond modeling. Buy her grandmother a house. Get off the reservation. Go to college. All of which endeared her to him a lot more than the usual type of girl he picks up at bars.

Now he wishes that he hadn't mentioned her at all.

"Not much to tell, really," he says to Serena. He sounds unconvincing, even to himself.

Serena rolls her bracelet between her thumb and forefinger. "I thought you liked her," she says, and flicks her eyes up at him expectantly.

Chuck looks at her and sighs. It's not the kind of thing he would normally tell Serena. It's not the kind of thing he would normally tell anyone, because it's the kind of thing that shines a spotlight directly into the loneliest part of his soul.

But something about the way she's looking up at him, without a trace of guile in her eyes, makes him feel safe. So he does.

Last night he had taken Carissa to dinner, then to drinks, then to the penthouse and to his bed, and she had been underneath him, her breasts moving up and down with the force of his thrusts, her ankles on either side of his neck, moaning, and he had reached out and grabbed onto the railing of the bedpost to pound into her more quickly, and after a few seconds her eyes had rolled back into her head and she'd said in a helpless whisper-sigh, "God I love you," and a split-second later her eyes had snapped open and she'd looked up at him with a startled, self-deprecating laugh, and said "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that," and laughed again, obviously not wanting him to freak out, obviously expecting him to be amused too, to be pleased that he's provoked such an over-the-top sentiment from the girl he's currently fucking—

_I love you. I'm sorry, I didn't mean that._

—but it hadn't been funny to him, not funny at all. In fact, he'd felt sick.

"Because of Blair," Serena says after he finishes. She phrases it like a question, but it isn't one.

Chuck doesn't say anything.

"Chuck, she _did_ love you," Serena says with equal parts concern and reprimand. "You have to believe that."

"I'm sure she thought she did," Chuck says after a moment of hesitation, and looks at the floor.

The left corner of Serena's mouth quirks downward. It is plain she wants to argue with him, wants to tell him that he's wrong—no, more than that, she wants to _believe_ that he's wrong. But she can find neither the words nor the emotional reserve to defend the girl who's broken both their hearts.

"So you're not seeing Carissa anymore?" she asks.

"I just…" He sighs. "I couldn't." He pauses. "I couldn't even look at her, after that. I told her, 'it's not you, it's me,' but I don't think she believed me."

Now it's Serena's turn not to say anything.

"What about you?" he offers hopefully, wanting to shift the attention away from himself. "You seeing anyone?"

Serena's face contracts.

"I…" Her hand flutters in the air as if she's shooing away an insect. "I can't. I just feel like…I'm not…"

"Safe," he finishes her sentence, knowing exactly what she means.

After you've given another person everything you have—more than you could afford to lose—self-preservation becomes your top priority.

Happiness, an afterthought.

#

"Look, all I'm saying is that you could show a little bit more effort—" Dan is saying to Blair in a plaintive voice as they edge past several party guests and round the corner of the upstairs corridor.

"Oh, of _course_ you would think it's my fault," Blair says, rolling her eyes. "Did you ever consider that integrating you into my conversations is pretty difficult considering that you wrote a scathing social satire of _everyone_ at this party? God!" She tosses the rest of her vodka tonic down her throat. "Did you even _see_ the way Allegra looked at me?" she continues bitterly. "There's no way I'm getting a front-row seat at the show in Paris this year. I might as well as move to the outer boroughs and be done with it."

Lately Blair Waldorf has been noticing that the majority of the sentiments that come from her mouth are only half sincere. She _does_ want to go to Paris, not only because she wants to see the summer fashion shows but because she wants to see her picture in the tabloids—a picture with a caption that doesn't compare her behavior over the past year to Britney Spears' circa 2007. But she's also expecting Dan to take the cue, to playfully tell her that he would _love_ it if she moved to Brooklyn, because he doesn't want to impress anyone at this party with his literary stylings, he only wants _her_, she's all he needs, and she'll always be special to him, always be perfect, no matter what she does or what other people say about her.

But Dan doesn't say any of these things—or anything at all. He has come to an abrupt halt at the railing of the balcony and is looking down at the first floor with a shocked expression on his face, and Blair edges forward, wanting to know what could possibly be more interesting to him than her.

Chuck and Serena are posing together at the entrance for the party photographer. Her arm is slung over his shoulder; his hand is at her waist. The flashbulb lights up their faces—once, twice—looking happy and at ease. The photographer thanks them and moves away, but Chuck frowns and stops Serena from pulling away from him with the hand he holds at her waist.

For a second, he peers intently at her face. Then he licks the tip of his thumb, and touches it down on her cheekbone. While he performs this operation, Serena stands still without flinching or blinking, and when he draws his hand back and presents the pad of his thumb to her (a fleck of glitter on its tip), she laughs, and the musical sound echoes through the lobby and up the stairs to the balcony where Blair stands watching, feeling as though a poisonous dart has struck her in the heart.

"Unbelievable," Dan says.

"I don't care that they're here," Blair says a little too forcefully.

"Yes, you do," Dan says.

"Not as much as _you_ do," she bites back, feeling angry that Dan isn't already leading her away from the place where they just witnessed such an unforced gesture of intimacy between their ex-lovers, comforting her, telling that they can go back to the loft where she'll be safeguarded from the life that was once hers.

"I care because I care about _you_," Dan says, but the words ring hollow in her ears, because he's not even looking at her anymore. His eyes are fixed on the floor below, and when he walks down the stairs his spine is rigid with affronted masculinity.

Blair grits her teeth and stalks off to get another drink.

Downstairs, Serena tells Chuck she'll have white wine, and as he walks away to the bar, she feels a light touch on her shoulder and turns around with a smile on her face.

When she sees Dan standing there, her smile immediately crumbles, falls away.

"What are you doing here?" he says in a short voice.

"I—I'm with Chuck," she says, gesturing over her shoulder, "he's friends with Allegra. He—"

"You just can't help yourself, can you?" Dan says to her in his most spiteful tone. "First there was that Gossip Girl blast, and now you show up here with _him_." His eyes pan over her body, as if he's looking for evidence. "Well, what should Blair and I expect next, Serena? A Van der Bass sex tape?"

Serena flinches as though he's just struck her. At that moment she appears utterly defenseless, like a gentle creature being pushed out of its cage into an alien habitat.

"Just because you're unhappy doesn't mean you have to spoil things for people who _are_," Dan is saying, and she realizes that she can't listen to this anymore, _won't _listen to it, won't take any more of this poison from the boy who once claimed he would love her forever, and so she turns and flees, darting past Chuck who is returning with two drinks in his hands.

Chuck looks at Serena's face as she passes him by and then looks at Dan and his eyes flash fire.

"_Hey_," he says with a threatening edge to his voice. He quickly sets the drinks aside on a hallway table and walks over to Dan. "You stay away from her," he orders in a low growl, his finger an inch from Dan's throat.

"This is low, Chuck, even for you," Dan seethes.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Oh, gee, I wonder," Dan pretends to pontificate. "You coming here tonight. Bringing Serena of all people. You just can't leave Blair alone, can you?"

"I didn't even know Blair was going to be here tonight," Chuck says, disgusted.

"Of course you knew," Dan cries. "Why else would you bringher?" He gestures towards the hallway through which Serena fled.

"Because she's my _friend_," Chuck immediately replies, by this point offended on multiple levels.

Dan scoffs. "You can't be seri—_friend_? Really?"

"Yes, Humphrey. _Friend_. A relationship founded upon mutual respect, affection and trust. No wonder you're so fucking confused. You have no idea what the word even means."

Dan shakes his head. "You know what, Chuck? You don't get to tell me anything. You hear me? _Anything_. You know nothing about friendship, or love, or…any of it. Because if there's any kind of…emotional autism anywhere on the spectrum, you _have it_."

Chuck looks at Dan for a moment, his eyes a-gleam, his mouth slightly open. It's as if there are simply too many words to say and he has to figure out a way to say them all at once.

"Have you ever heard the story of the shitty island, Humphrey?" he finally asks in a brisk voice.

"Um." Dan is caught off-guard. He blinks; wonders if this is a trick question. "No?"

"I came across it in a novel I was reading a couple of months ago," Chuck says. "Murakami. It was brilliant. Completely original. You really should give it a read sometime; it might inspire you to write something other than a thinly veiled _roman à clef_. Anyways."

He clears his throat. "Somewhere far, far away, there's a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not even worth giving a name. It's covered with shitty palm trees, and on the shitty palm trees are coconuts that give off a shitty smell. And shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they eat these shitty coconuts all day long. And then they shit the foulest shit imaginable, and it falls on the ground in little shitty mounds, and the shit fertilizes the palm trees, and then they get even shittier. It's an endless cycle.

"And as I was standing here looking at you, I suddenly remembered the story of the shitty island. Because there's a certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of putrefaction, that goes on sustaining itself in a sort of…self-perpetuating process. And once it passes a certain point, nothing can stop it.

"Are you catching my drift yet, Humphrey?" Chuck continues, his voice growing sharper. "You weren't always this way. I mean, you were always _kind of_ shitty, because you were always a self-righteous prick who thought he was better than everyone else. But over the past few years, as far as you're concerned, it's just been one never-ending cycle of shittiness, hasn't it? And yet you somehow still manage to convince yourself that you're the _good guy _here. And it fucking _baffles_ me."

"Okay, now," Dan interrupts with a forced laugh. "This is where _I _get to ask what the hell you're talking about. Because I—I _am_ the good guy here. I've been taking care of Blair all this time, and—"

"No, you're not," Chuck interrupts him. "You treat everyone like _shit_. Even friends, even family, even people who used to be important to you. Only _you_ could write a novel trashing every single person you know and then wonder how anyone could think you're not the nice little 'Lonely Boy' from Brooklyn anymore."

Dan is opening his mouth, but Chuck cuts him off.

"The only exception is Blair," he concedes, "but you treat her like a child, which is hardly any better. I saw that photo of you parading her around the Met in a fluffy pink dress and that plastic crown on her head. She looked like a six-year-old playing dress-up. The ink wasn't even dry on her divorce papers yet. It was pathetic.

"So don't try to tell me you've been _taking care of her_," he continues. "What you've done is take a grown women and turn her into a little girl who depends on you for _everything. _I bet you cut up her steak for her when you two go out to eat. And you indulge her, because you _like_ it. You _like_ her needing you. You wouldn't have it any other way.

"So, no, you're not the good guy, Humphrey," Chuck reiterates in a tired voice, as if he's exhausted with this entire situation, as if he can't believe that he even needs to say these things out loud. "You're manipulative, and petty, and selfish, and codependent. And what's more, you're judgmental, and self-righteous, and when anyone doesn't live up to the ridiculous standards you set for them, you're downright _cruel_. You're just a shitty human being. And somewhere deep inside of you, in some dark corner of your soul where you still possess an ounce of self-awareness, you _know_ _it_." He steps backwards and begins to walk away. "You _have _to," he says over his shoulder, and walks off down the corridor after Serena.

For a moment or two, Dan stands there, paralyzed, feeling a nauseous sensation in his stomach. As though he's falling at a terrific speed, as though the ground has opened up beneath him, as though he's being swallowed down, down, into a horrible black pit.

#

When Chuck moves from room to room upstairs, looking for Serena, and sees Blair standing there in the hallway before him, he suddenly feels _furious_—and for once, he allows himself to feel furious, because he is sick to death of the alternative, which is feeling not-good-enough.

And now that he's finally furious, it is suddenly beyond him to speak, because he just cannot believe that Blair chose someone with such _ridiculous fucking hair_ over him, and so he just looks at her and lets out a coarse disbelieving laugh, a scornful laugh like a cough, and walks down the hall so quickly that she feels a breeze against her skin as he passes her by.

And at that moment Chuck spots Serena stepping out of the guest bathroom at the end of the hallway, her face still puffy from crying, and he walks up to her, takes her by the hand and leads her away.

Serena turns back for a half-second to glance at Blair, but Blair's the one who stiffens as if she's turned into a pillar of salt.

"Can you believe them?" Dan says, walking up behind her, holding a single shot of bourbon that was a quadruple five minutes earlier. "Showing up here together?"

Blair is still staring after Chuck and Serena. She takes a moment to clear her throat.

"You know what, I don't even care if they're sleeping together," she says, and feels disgusted to the point of nausea by the words that she's just spoken.

"Me neither," Dan says into the bottom of his glass of bourbon. "I mean, they probably aren't," he quickly adds, not wanting to upset her. "Considering their track records, if it was going to happen, it would have happened already."

A strange light appears in Blair's eyes, and along with it, the knowledge that she possesses the ability to punish Dan Humphrey for having failed her earlier.

"Well, they did have that thing in high school for like five minutes," she says in a nonchalant way, "but that was obviously some cosmic aberration."

Dan nods, and then does a quick double take at her. "Wait, _what_?"

"You know. That secretive little fling they had sophomore year."

Dan blinks. "That was…_never_ on Gossip Girl," he chokes out.

"Like I said." Blair shrugs. "It was secret."

She looks up at Dan. "You mean Serena never told you?" she asks him, all wide eyes and innocence.

She is already looking away from him by the time he opens his mouth. "Huh," she says in an offhanded way, and takes a sip of her vodka tonic. "I wonder why."

#

"I am so sorry," Chuck is saying to Serena, and she is answering in a soft voice, "No, Chuck. It wasn't your fault. You didn't know they'd be there."

They are sitting in the back of his limo. They left the party almost ten minutes ago, but Serena can still feel the anger rolling off of Chuck's body in waves. He blows through his lips; he wipes his hands on his thighs.

"Thank you for defending me," Serena says after a short pause, hoping to find a way to defuse Chuck's temper.

"I didn't defend you so much as tell Humphrey what a colossal prick he is," Chuck says with consummate annoyance.

"He really pissed you off, huh?"

"I'm not angry at him," he says with a scoff. "I'd have to _care_ about him to be angry at him."

Serena looks at him, realizing what he means, and whom he's angry at.

"I hate her, Serena," he says in a grim voice, and shakes his head several times. "I love her, and I hate her. And I wish I didn't feel anything at all. I wish I were just…blank."

He stops speaking and pinches the space between his eyes with his left hand, and she reaches over and takes him by the right. Intertwines her fingers with his. But he doesn't move, or open his eyes.

"Things'll get better, Chuck," she says in a low voice.

Chuck laughs and takes his hand off his face. "I hope to God you're right," he says to the space in front of him. "Because I don't think I can take much more of this."

In answer, she takes him into her arms. After a moment's hesitation, he places a hand on the small of her back.

"Well, you're safe with me," she murmurs to him, and lays her head on his shoulder.

It happens all of a sudden. She can't pinpoint exactly what it is. Maybe it's the slight motion of his hand rubbing against the silk on her back. The smell of his cologne. Or the heat of the skin of his neck against her ear. Or the combination of the three, plus a million other unspoken things.

But out of nowhere there's this _electricity_ flickering back and forth between them. She is suddenly, painfully conscious of all the ways in which their bodies are touching. Of the shallowness of her breathing and his breathing, and the catch in her chest as her heart thumps against her sternum.

She sets her hand at Chuck's shoulder and begins to pull her body away, and her cheek grazes alongside his; she can feel the slightest trace of his stubble against her skin. His mouth is a centimeter from hers when she pauses for a moment, her head swimming with ambivalence, and in that moment, he leans forward and kisses her—a slow, deliberate, mostly close-mouthed kiss.

Their lips part with a soft sound like a question mark. It lingers in the air between them, and Serena is opening her mouth to answer when he sets his hand at the back of her neck and kisses her again.

This is not the way he kissed her on the dance floor last week. That was a celebratory sort of kiss. A kiss from someone who has just found out wonderful news. Like the end of a war, or the birth of a child.

This is a ripe, unabashedly sexual kiss. Their mouths move instinctually, urgently, in a pattern familiar to them both.

She closes her eyes and loses herself in their mutual motion, already feeling the surge of endorphins in her brain, remembering with a start how unbelievably _good_ it feels to be wanted like this, it's been so, so long—and he reaches down and crooks her legs over his lap and pulls her more tightly against him, grabbing her hips with both hands, and she hears herself make a low, dangerous noise in the back of her throat, an approving noise, an _aroused_ noise, and as soon as she does she suddenly realizes where this is going, starts to think about the consequences, and panic washes over her.

She sets her hand at his collarbone and gently, firmly pushes him away.

"Chuck-I-don't-think-this-is-a-good-idea," she says out loud in a rush.

Chuck stares at her for one standstill moment, then turns his head slightly and clears his throat.

"You're right," he admits, pushing her legs off of his lap and disengaging his body from hers. "I'm sorry. I….don't know what I was thinking."

"It's okay," Serena says, barely hearing the words over the commotion of her heart in her chest. Chuck is already edging away from her to the other side of the seat. "You're really mixed up right now. I am too."

Chuck runs his hand over his face. He stares at the floor, obviously mortified, and Serena curses herself for letting things happen in the way that they just did, during a time when she needs him so desperately that his name appears on her phone nine times out of ten as soon as she presses the "call" button.

Feeling wretched and confused, she turns away from him, looks out of the window. Silence falls over the limo. Neither of them speak or look at each other.

After a few moments, she surreptitiously lifts her hand to her lips, prods them gently with her fingers.

His kiss is still burning her mouth.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Some of you might have noticed that I added the "Friendship" category to this story. That's because this story is about Chuck and Serena's friendship. After weeks of ambivalence, I decided that I just couldn't see a romance developing between them. I hate to be all spoileriffic here, but I don't want people to flee the story in droves because they don't like C/S as a couple, and I don't want to disappoint the people who do.**

**You may then be asking, "well, TB, what this hell just happened in this chapter, then?" I think that Chuck and Serena's relationship has suddenly become very intimate, and they're confused about their feelings for each other. They'll have the chance to talk about it in a later chapter. In the next chapter, I'm going to show their relationship in high school. Like Blair says, they did have a sort of fling "for like five minutes." It was very casual, but they ended up having a big falling out as a result, and I wanted to write an imaginary version of their history as friends in order to set up their interaction in the pilot.**

**Also, I would like to mention that writing Blair and Dan as a couple is actually really fun if you do it with the intention of showing how they bring out the absolute worst in each other. **

**Thanks for Maribells for betaing, and thanks to everyone for reading! Please review! xoxo, TB**


	5. Bad Twin

"**Bad twin/ You're such a beautiful thing / I can't believe / You're just like me / Under your second skin"—Babybird, "Bad Twin"**

* * *

><p>At age thirteen, Chuck and Serena kiss for the first time. They are playing Seven Minutes in Heaven in Nate Archibald's bedroom closet during a party that they organized ("organized," in this context, meaning "told everyone they knew to come to Nate's apartment because they knew his parents would be out of town").<p>

When Serena draws lots and ends up with Chuck's name, they look at each other with mild amusement, neither excited nor upset by the prospect of fooling around with each other. They set down their drinks, and stand up to go into the closet amidst cheers and jeers from their classmates.

They only stay there for three and a half minutes. Their kissing halts when a minor catastrophe occurs: Chuck cuts his upper lip on Serena's braces.

#

At age fourteen, Serena loses her virginity to a boy named Alistair Westing, whom she's been dating for approximately six weeks.

On the day in question, Lily is vacationing in Tahiti with Klaus. The maid is asleep, mouth open and snoring, in front of _telenovelas_ in the living room. Having been ordered by Serena to stay out of her room while her boyfriend is over, Erik is sulking in his bedroom, listening to music with his headphones on.

Serena and Alastair are lying on her bed, looking into each other's eyes—tentative, excited, frightened. Half smiling, half scared, she asks him if he "wants to try it." He affirms that he does, and they proceed to have strange, clammy intercourse that is disappointing and puzzling to the both of them.

They do at least use protection, God bless them.

The next time they're alone together, it quickly becomes apparent to Serena that Alastair expects to have sex with her again. When she is hedgy, reluctant, uncomfortable with the idea, he grows frustrated.

"I don't see what the big deal is _now_," he says. "I mean, you've already done it once."

She has sex with him again. After he leaves, she cries.

The romance fizzles out shortly afterwards.

#

At age fourteen, Chuck learns how to perform oral sex courtesy of Giovanna, the nineteen-year-old Italian au pair.

He later spots Giovanna leaving his father's bedroom in the middle of the night

He never mentions this to anyone.

#

At age fourteen, Chuck and Serena go out clubbing with a group of friends from school. Having raided the mini-bar in his father's limo on the way, Chuck is already drunk and feeling reckless. He asks Serena to dance, then, thirty seconds into the song, reaches down and grabs her ass.

Serena pushes him away, pissed, and walks off the dance floor so quickly her high heels clack like castanets.

The next week, whenever she sees him in the hallway at school, she rolls her eyes and shakes her head. It miffs Chuck more than he would like to admit, even though he thinks it is mostly a charade for Blair's benefit.

#

A few weeks later, Serena calls Chuck in the middle of the night. She's alone, in a panic, convinced she's going to die because she's taken two OxyContin after a couple of gin-and-tonics. Chuck calms her down long enough to figure out the dosage, and then — in spite of her insistence that she can literally feel _her pulse slowing down,_ she _swears_, it's just going to keep slowing down until she passes out, stops breathing and _dies_! — he reassures her that she isn't going to die, at least not anytime soon.

"What are you doing taking OxyContin, anyways?" he asks, curious, and lies back onto his pillows and stretches an arm over his head.

OxyContin is a prescription painkiller, but he can't imagine Serena van der Woodsen feeling any pain, much less trying to kill it.

"I thought it might help me sleep," Serena says, as if she knows how foolish that sounds.

She pauses. "I can never get to sleep," she mumbles.

Chuck can never get to sleep either. And he tells her so, just so that she won't think he has any other reason to stay on the line with her until the sun comes up, by which point she is finally convinced that she's not going to die and tells him good night—"I mean, good morning," she corrects herself, and laughs her golden laugh.

Her voice drops an octave; she suddenly sounds more serious, like someone ten years older. "Thanks, Chuck," he hears her murmur into the receiver.

"Don't mention it," he says.

"And…" She hesitates for a second. "Could you maybe not say anything to Blair?"

He doesn't. In fact, neither of them mentions it again.

#

"Chuck, hey, um…this is kind of a stupid question, but do you maybe wanna go to the Spring Fling dance with me? I mean, not as a date or anything. It's just…" The phone crackles with static when Serena sighs into it. "Nate and Blair are going together, and I'm Blair's friend, and you're Nate's friend, so…it just kind of makes sense…"

"Oh," Chuck says.

He thinks it over for a moment. He wasn't planning on going to the Spring Fling dance—school events aren't really his thing—but if Serena is there, Blair will be distracted, which means that Nate will likely be able to cut out early. Maybe they can even go check out that new strip club over in the Meatpacking district...

"Sure," he says. "You wanna pre-party at my suite?"

There is a pause on the other end of the line. "You have your own _suite?_"

They are already buzzed when they show up at the dance, and they sneak off several times throughout the night to drink out of Chuck's flask of scotch. With each swig Serena becomes more giggly, more animated.

When the freshmen class officers announce that Serena has been elected Spring Fling Princess, she looks at Chuck, open-mouthed, and lets out a squeal before giving him a big hug.

"Congratulations," Blair says with a tight-lipped smile when Serena returns to the dance floor amidst lingering applause.

"I didn't even know there _was_ a Spring Fling Princess," Serena says, taking off her crown and turning it around in front of her to admire it.

Blair swallows, hard. "Some people didn't think it was fair that only juniors and seniors could be elected Spring Fling Queen," she explains. "So they petitioned to create a junior category."

"'Some people?'" Serena repeats in confusion, as applause rings out in the ballroom again. A junior named Jessica Templeton has just been named Spring Fling Queen. "What people?"

At which point Nate interrupts to offer his own congratulations.

Chuck ends up having a lot of fun, largely thanks to Serena. She is not a very good dancer, but she has a lot of enthusiasm, and her presence attracts a large number of girls to the dance floor. All Chuck has to do is stay in her general vicinity, and by the end of the night he's gotten the phone numbers of four impossibly beautiful senior girls who have never spoken to him before.

"You're much a better wingman than Nate," he tells her as she tilts his flask against her lips, turns it upside down, drains the last drop of its contents.

He isn't even annoyed when Serena vomits onto the floor of his limo on the ride home. Only mildly amused.

Blair is not.

"She's a _girl_, Chuck," she says, struggling to hook one of Serena's rag doll-limp arms over her shoulder. "She can't match you drink for drink."

"I dunno," Chuck says languidly. By this point he is very drunk himself. "She was doing pretty well there, for a while."

"I'm feeling much better now," Serena says in an apologetic way.

Blair clicks her tongue. "You need to be more careful."

If Blair Waldorf had a coat of arms, Chuck thinks, rolling his eyes, "be careful" would be her family motto.

Wait—she probably already has a coat of arms, he realizes. With some vengeful Latin inscribed underneath it. All the old-money families do.

He pours himself another scotch and pretends not to notice when Blair shoots him a withering look of disapproval.

"Come on," she urges Serena as the limo rolls to a stop, plainly wanting to get her away from Chuck as quickly as possible.

Nate gets out of the other side and walks around to the sidewalk. He extends his hand to Blair and helps her step out of the limo, all the while looking down at Serena with obvious concern.

"Serena," Blair says. "Come _on_."

Having by now grasped that she is home, Serena makes a valiant attempt to step onto the curb. She has some trouble, though, because her shoes aren't on her feet: they're dangling off of her ankles by their thin snakeskin straps, and they twist and drag along the floor behind her.

She half-falls, half-trips onto the sidewalk. Her dress rides up over her thighs, revealing a triangular swath of hot pink fabric between her legs.

"Oww," she says forlornly, looking at her scraped knees.

"Can't you help her, Nate?" Blair says, exasperated.

Looking flushed and uncomfortable, Nate pulls Serena by her hands onto her feet, and she giggles and pretends to stumble forward into his arms.

Chuck raises an eyebrow at this, but says nothing.

Nate bends down and lifts Serena over his shoulder (she squeals in surprise), tucking an arm around her thighs to lock her into place. Her mane of long blond hair hangs down nearly to the ground, and it waves back and forth as Nate slowly carries her away.

"Wee," Serena gleefully says into Nate's back. "I'm upside down!"

Her crown has fallen off her head; it is lying on the pavement behind her. Blair picks it up and looks at it. Clutches it in both hands. Then she gives her head a little shake and hurries to catch up with Serena and Nate.

"I'm sending you a cleaning bill, Van der Woodsen," Chuck calls out after them.

When Serena raises her arm and flips him off, he can't repress a chuckle.

When Blair turns around to glare at him, he shrugs and lifts his glass in an ironic toast.

#

At age fifteen (barely fifteen), Serena meets the captain of the swim team at the pool underneath St. Jude's once or twice a week. Together, they swim. Splash each other. Laugh. Take showers in the empty locker room and fuck against the tile walls.

After he graduates, he goes on a month long trip to China with his family. When he comes back to the States, he doesn't even bother to call Serena. She finds out he's back through Facebook, just like everyone else.

Shrugging off her hurt feelings, she sends him a text: **hey welcome back! u wanna get together sometime this week? **

He doesn't answer this text. Or the next. Or the next.

A few weeks later, she runs into him at the annual White Party at the Hamptons. She confronts him, asks him _why_, why did he stop talking to her, what did she do that was _so wrong_ that he didn't even have the courtesy to break up with her?

His mouth curves into a deep frown; his eyes boggle with disbelief.

"I figured you _knew_," he says. "Like...I thought it was _obvious_."

#

At age fifteen, Chuck meets a thirty-year-old woman in a bar. After an hour of flirting (and several successful circumnavigations of every question pertaining to his age), he asks her if she wants to "go somewhere," and she agrees. Together they walk to her apartment, a small studio where the walls are lined with books and the bed folds down from a hidden compartment in the wall.

Smitten with her obvious intelligence and dark good looks, he asks for her number after they have sex, but she scoffs and says, "Why? So you can ask meto _prom_?" with such scorn that he is flooded with shame.

He leaves without another word.

#

At age fifteen and a half, Serena and Chuck are sophomores. Serena is failing geometry and chemistry, and she has been sent to Principal Queller's office three times this semester for wearing her tartan skirt too short. Chuck is failing everything but European History, having taken an acute interest in the Napoleonic Wars; but even in history, he has accumulated more absences and tardies than everyone else in his class combined.

One day, the photography teacher announces that he's assigned them as darkroom partners, and they glance at each other across the room, identical gleams of conspiracy in their eyes.

In the opposite corner of the classroom, sitting on the front row, Blair Waldorf almost imperceptibly frowns.

#

Serena is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the darkroom, leaning against the wall. Chuck is lying on his back, knees at an angle; his head is cradled by the supplest part of her thigh.

Serena glances up at the photos hanging on a line above the bins of stop-bath. "God, I can't believe people used to make photos like this," she sighs. "It takes _forever_."

She wiggles her leg slightly to nudge Chuck. "Hey. Puff, puff, pass, Bass."

Chuck passes the joint up to her without even looking. He almost hits her in the face with it.

"Watch it!" she says, laughing. "You almost took out one of my eyes."

"Sorry," he says. "My mind was elsewhere."

"Hmm," Serena remarks with a wry, knowing smile. "I wonder where."

Chuck interlocks his hands and sets them on top of his head. His expression is thoughtful.

"Who do you think the hottest girl in school is?" he asks.

"Jessica Templeton," Serena answers, setting the joint to her lips.

"Wow, you didn't even have to think about it," he says in an admiring tone. "I always suspected you had some same-sex tendencies."

Serena shoots him a mock-angry glare, but its effect is lost in the haze of smoke around her face.

"Why do you ask?" she says with a little smile, reverting to her usual teasing tone. "Is she the next item on your to-do list?"

She bounces his head with her thigh again.

"I _wish_," Chuck sighs. "I've already hooked up with three of her friends. I'm thinking my prospects are...questionable, at best."

Serena shakes her head. "How do you have sex with so many girls?"

"What do you mean, 'so many girls?'"

She rolls her eyes. Recites. "Ashleigh Hornsby, Zara Archanassian, Jamie Li, Anamaria Vargas. Chloe Bowie, Bethany Davis…"

"I haven't had sex with half of them," Chuck says. "I don't think I've ever even spoken to Bethany Davis."

"Still. You have a reputation for a reason."

Chuck purses his lips, conceding the point.

"How come?"

"I don't know." He thinks it over. "I guess…I know a secret other guys don't know."

"What's that?" She is curious.

He shrugs. "Girls like having sex too." He looks up at her as if he's expecting her to confirm this point.

"Doesn't mean they like having sex with _you_," she counters playfully.

"Judging from the racket they make, I'd say I'm doing something right," he says, leaning up slightly and reaching into his pocket.

This motion hitches Serena's skirt up a couple of inches. She thinks about tugging it back down, but for some reason, unknown even to herself, she doesn't bother.

"So what are you doing this weekend?" Chuck asks her after relighting the joint and passing it back to her.

"Going out to Georgina's."

"Oh, _riiight_," Chuck drawls. "Remind me why you're friends with her again?"

Serena frowns slightly. "I don't know," she mumbles in a way that suggests that she _does _know.

She ashes the joint in a film canister by her knee. "It's just..." She hesitates; tries to figure out how to say what she means. "There are certain things...I can't talk about with Blair. You know?"

"Things like...penises?"

She smacks him.

He chuckles. "I thought so."

"It's not just that," she says. "When I'm with Georgina, she doesn't _expect _things from me. She doesn't want me to wear a certain type of clothes, or act a certain way. She doesn't want me to be..."

She thinks it over for a moment. "Anything but _fun_," she finishes. "And I _like_ being fun, so..."

There is a pause.

"Do you have the lighter?" she asks him. "The joint's gone out again."

Chuck fishes in his pants pocket and hands it to her. Glances up at her as she turns its flint wheel with her thumb.

In the warm light of the flickering flame, her face is especially beautiful.

"Hey—is it true that you're seeing Matt Archer?" he asks, looking at his fingernails in order to give the impression of complete nonchalance. "I overheard that in the courtyard today."

Serena shrugs as she blows out a stream of smoke. "I guess," she says without much enthusiasm. "Sort of-kind of."

"You know, it's funny, I never took you for the lacrosstitute type."

"Don't be a dick, Chuck," she interrupts him, raising her eyebrows in warning.

"Maybe because you're _not_," he replies, raising his eyebrows back at her. "So...what exactly sparked your interest in Matt, if I may ask? I'm guessing it wasn't his scintillating conversation skills."

Serena doesn't answer.

"Let me guess—Blair set you up."

Serena blows out a sigh through her nose.

"Well, that's hardly a surprise," Chuck says, looking at his fingernails again. "She wants you hanging out with someone more respectable than Georgina." He pauses. "And me," he adds.

"She does think you're a bad influence on me," Serena admits.

Chuck isn't remotely surprised by this. "Am I?" he wants to know.

"Yeah. But only about as much as I am on you."

This makes him smile.

"Your hair's getting really long," she says, brushing back his bangs with her fingers. He looks very handsome in the red cast of the darkroom lights. "I'd say it's time for a haircut."

"No way," he returns saucily, reaching up to take the joint from her other hand. "Girls love my hair. It gives them something to hold on to."

Serena stops playing with his hair. Needing something else to do with her hands, she reaches into her purse beside her and pulls out her cell phone.

"What are you doing that for?" Chuck says. "You know there's no reception in here."

"I'm bored," she declares with far more force than necessary.

After trying and failing for approximately the hundredth time to get a signal, she gives up and tosses her phone back into her bag with a theatrical sigh.

She turns and looks up at the clock on the wall, and then down at Chuck, who is busying himself repairing a run in the joint with a dab of spit.

She bites her lip. "Do you wanna like, make out or something?" she asks, a little too casually. "I mean, like—just for the hell of it."

Chuck cranes his head back until he's looking up at her. Tries to determine whether she's serious or not.

When several seconds have gone by and she hasn't yet cracked a smile, he shrugs. "Okay."

He pushes himself up to a sitting position. "Just promise me it won't be like last time," he says, playfully referencing the time when they were thirteen and he cut his lip on her braces.

"You know what—never mind," Serena says, already having second thoughts.

"No, no, wait," Chuck says, and, pinching the joint and lifting it to his lips, he takes one last mighty drag. The joint crackles and hisses as fire consumes it, transforms it from solid to smoke.

"Breathe in through my mouth," he says, gulping back the smoke in his lungs, and leans forward to set his mouth against hers.

Their lips dovetail like two halves of a whole. He exhales and she inhales, pulls the smoke out of his body and into her body, and she is shocked by how intimate it feels, sharing a breath with someone else.

Pulling away from him, she exhales a vast cloud of smoke that whirls and curls around both of their faces. Half-dizzy, heads hazy, they look at each other through the arabesque patterns that twist in the air between them.

They smile, lean forward. Their lips coalesce in a kiss.

They are immediately enveloped by intense sensations. The syrupy, earthy notes of marijuana. The heat of their meeting mouths. The gentle motion of the other's tongue. The blood surging through their bodies, pumping through pulse points.

She curves her legs over his legs and on either side of his torso, and he sticks his hands into her hair and guides her into deeper, more vigorous kisses. They rock back and forth like a ship on the sea, making soft, approving sounds against each other's mouths.

When the bell rings a few minutes later, they startle, breaking the kiss. They look at each other. For a moment it seems like no one's going to say anything.

"You're a much better kisser than you used to be," Chuck finally says.

Serena gapes at him.

"What? You used to be _terrible_," he says.

"Fuck you, Chuck," she says with a roll of her eyes, and stands up, shaking her head.

Smirking, Chuck gets up jerkily and makes an adjustment in the front of his trousers.

He looks at Serena with newly piqued interest. She is unclipping the photographs hanging on the line. His eyes glide over her back, her waist, the curve of her backside.

"Hey," he says in his most persuasive voice, reaching out and touching her at the hip. "How about we continue where we left off, some other time?"

Serena twitches her hips away. "This was a one-time deal kind of thing, Chuck," she says, sliding the photos into a folder.

The words don't sound convincing, even to her.

"How about this weekend?" Chuck suggests, undeterred. "Maybe over at Georgina's?"

"I thought you hated Georgina."

He shrugs. "Doesn't mean I can't crash her party."

"Besides—" Serena flips her hair over her shoulder. "I'm supposed to meet up with Matt."

"Oh, _Matt_," Chuck returns in a mocking tone. "How could I forget. Maybe because he's utterly forgettable in every possible way."

She shrugs. "He's got a really nice body."

"Doesn't get your motor running, though. Does he?"

She turns and stares at him. "When did you suddenly start caring about my love life?" she asks sharply.

"I don't,"he immediately replies. "Did you bring the Febreze this time? Or did you forget, _again_?"

Serena pulls a spray bottle out of her bag and shakes it at him like _what_.

""Arms out!" she orders him, and he complies. She sprays his uniform down, back and front, then hands him the bottle.

"Man, it's like those movies where people go to prison and they have to get deloused," he remarks as he sprays down her back.

This tickles Serena's funny bone and she giggles for a while. "Except we have to get de-stanked," she says, whirling around so that he can spray her front. "Did you remember the Clear-eyes?"

He did. They both squirt a couple of drops into their eyes, blink for a few moments, and then check their reflections in the mirror on the wall behind the bins of developer.

"Your eyes are still totally half-mast," Serena reports.

"So are yours," Chuck says, eyeing both of their reflections. "We both look stoned as shit."

They look at each other and erupt into snickers.

"Which means," he continues, inspired, "that we should probably just skip sixth period and go get truffle fries at Gilt."

"Oh my God," Serena says with wide eyes. "That is the best idea you've EVER had."

"Come on," he says, slinging his book bag over his shoulder. "Let's take the back stairwell. Maybe we can catch Nate before he goes to gym."

"I'll text Blair," she says as they step out into the hallway.

Chuck snorts. "_Why_?"

"To ask if she wants to come."

"She's not going to come."

"She might."

"You know, I can't even decide what's less likely," he says as they quickly move down the stairs, hopping down two steps at a time. "Blair Waldorf cutting chem lab or Blair Waldorf eating a potato."

"Hey," Serena says, with playful warning in her tone. "She _did _eat ONE French fry off my plate that one—"

He suddenly stops on the landing, pulls her towards him by the waist, and kisses her again. She kisses him back for a moment, mostly out of surprise, but then she breaks away.

"Chuck—" she warily begins.

"So I'll see you this weekend, right?" he cuts her off. His eyes dance over her face, searching for signs of acquiescence.

Serena makes a scoffing noise. It is meant to communicate the unlikelihood of this scenario but actually signals the opposite.

"You are _way _too cocky, Bass," she says.

He opens his mouth to reply, but she immediately sets her hand over his mouth.

"Please forget I just said that," she says, her face twinging with disgust, and continues down the stairs.

Smirking, Chuck rolls his lower lip over between his teeth.

#

Georgina's parents went abroad three weeks ago—and so did she, supposedly, to go do outreach work in a _favela _in Rio. Instead, she's been holding an epic bender at the Sparks's country estate, and even Chuck is astonished at its debauchery.

The house is wrecked. There is broken glass everywhere; graffiti is scrawled on the walls. Drunk, stoned and otherwise fucked-up people sprawl on the furniture, lie passed-out on the floors. They line the hallways, yelling at each other over the thumping bass coming from another room, where couples dry-hump on a makeshift dance floor with an overhead black-light that reveals far more than Chuck really needed to know.

The acrid smell of spilled liquor and chemical odor of crack linger in the air.

With a great deal of excitement and a little apprehension, Chuck explores the house room by room. In an upstairs bedroom, he meets an Asian girl with freckles whom he's sure he's seen in magazine ads, and they end up doing line after line and babbling at each other for over a half an hour before he realizes that he slept with her six months earlier, at which point he mumbles an excuse, and leaves.

He is wandering around the house, outrageously high, when it occurs to him to check the Baroque gardens out back. There he finds a small crowd of people gathered around a keg next to a bubbling, three-tiered fountain. Standing in the water—her little white dress drenched, transparent, clinging to her body—is Serena.

When Chuck sees her, he is seized by a desire that the cocaine in his system magnifies into something almost mythological. He feels like a Greek god, come down to earth to take whatever mortal woman he chooses and fuck her into oblivion.

"Chuck!" Serena squeals, and drunkenly wobbles back and forth on her feet. "Come play in the water." She twirls around; she laughs.

"You'll have to make it worth my while," he tells her.

Serena beams. Eyes glazed over, in an intoxicated trance, she slowly lifts the skirt of her dress up by the hem, revealing her thighs, her silken slip, her stomach. Her breasts, still wet with water from the fountain and gleaming in the moonlight.

Hypnotized, Chuck walks towards her.

"Oh, fuck you, Quinn!" Serena suddenly curses at a boy to her right who is holding up a cell phone to take a picture of her, and tugs her dress down over her body again.

She yelps when Chuck takes her by the hand and pulls her dripping wet body down over his shoulder. Amidst insinuating jeers from the crowd by the fountain, he carries her away.

"Where are we going?" she asks him, swinging her feet playfully.

"Here looks pretty good," he says.

He stops behind a cluster of trees and sets her on her feet. Looks at her for a moment, his breathing ragged with the effort of having carried her. His clothes are soaked through from their contact with her wet body.

"You did that on purpose," he says.

"Did what?"

He takes her hand and places it over his crotch.

"_Oh_," she says, eyes wide, mouth round.

She draws back her hand. Scans his face, sees the hard look in his eyes.

"Chuck, you're high," she says in excuse.

"And you're drunk," he counters, trailing his finger up her neck. His voice is throaty with lust. "Let's make a mistake."

Serena has seen Chuck do this before. On numerous occasions, with numerous girls. She's watched him stand close to them, _too _close, and drop his voice to a low rasp. Stroke them down the length of their arms, just barely touching them, with the back of his hand.

She's seen them shift their posture, angle their bodies towards him. Grow flushed as their lips part, as they breathe more heavily. She's seen the look of slow surrender in their faces, the tinge of fear in their eyes—fear not of Chuck, but of themselves, what they were capable of, after only a few moments of him whispering startlingly arousing things into their ears.

She never quite understood it before, this strange power he possesses. She always wondered why so many girls fell for it. Why they trusted someone so obviously untrustworthy.

Now she knows. The attraction isn't based on trust, isn't based on intimacy. It's the opposite. It's like they're strangers to each other. Like there won't be any consequences—_no._

Like the consequences just don't _matter_.

She twines her arms around Chuck's shoulders and wrenches his body towards hers. Pulls him into an open-mouthed kiss.

Caught off balance, he takes a couple of staggering steps forward, and she lets out a startled noise when she feels her back slam against a trunk of a tree.

As soon as their feet are firmly planted on the ground, they are kissing again. Sloppily, with lots of tongue. With the kind of unreserved enthusiasm that belongs only to the young and intoxicate.

His hands rove, slide under her dress. His fingers dig into her thighs; they hook on the side-seams of her panties. He tugs at them, trying to force them down, but they are wet from her earlier splashing in the fountain. They cling stubbornly to her flesh.

"Serena?" a voice calls out somewhere in the darkness behind them.

They freeze.

"_Shit_," Serena says under her breath, and shoves Chuck away.

A figure emerges out of the darkness—a tall, well-built boy who, aside from his reddish hair, bears a striking resemblance to Nate Archibald.

"_Hey_," he says to Serena, sounding more than a little pissy. "I've been looking all over for you."

He looks her up and down. "How did you get so _wet_?" he asks.

Chuck can't hold back an ironic laugh.

All of the people to interrupt them, it just hadto be Matt Archer. Who resembles Nate but lacks all of his redeeming qualities. Who treats him, at best, as utterly incidental. Who outweighs him by a good thirty pounds of solid muscle, and whom even a kilo of coke couldn't convince him to take in a fight.

"Matty!" Serena sounds almost genuinely happy to see him. She jogs over to him, throws her arms around his shoulders and stands on tippy-toe to kiss him. "I was beginning to think you weren't coming."

Matt looks over her shoulder, eyes narrowing at Chuck, who is lingering in the darkness underneath the trees. "What have you been doing out here?" he asks, suspicious.

"Playing hide and seek," Serena answers. "But now you've found me, so..."

She trails off, looking up at him with the sweetest expression she can summon. Then she takes him by the hand and leads him away.

Like the big, dumb ox that he is, Chuck thinks with a scowl, tugging his clinging-wet shirt away from his body.

#

Serena is still holding Matt Archer's hand when she walks into the courtyard Monday morning. Catching sight of Chuck and Nate sitting on the stairway, she smiles and gives them a little wave.

Nate returns her wave with a small smile of his own. Chuck just stares at her, his expression surly, until her eyes shift guiltily away.

He watches her go, eyeing the shortness of her skirt, the motion of her tanned thighs. Thighs that he'd grabbed on Saturday night, kneaded between his fingers.

"I bet you'll anything Serena gets sent home again today," he confides.

Nate looks at him as if he doesn't understand.

"Didn't you see the skirt she was wearing? It was cut right up to her pussy."

"_Jesus_, Chuck," Nate says, disgusted.

"Oh, come on. Like you didn't notice."

"No—I didn't, as a matter of fact," Nate testily replies. "I don't look at Serena that way."

Chuck stares at him. "Seriously?" he says, raising his eyebrows.

Nate shakes his head.

"Not even once?"

"What did I just say, man? _No_."

Chuck laughs. "You're full of shit," he says, looking away.

"Look—did it ever cross your mind that I'm just not like you?"

"What do you mean, _'_like me?'"

Nate shrugs, irritated. "I don't know. Trying to get laid all the time, and it doesn't even matter who it's with."

"_Ouch_," Chuck says, setting his hand against his heart as if he's wounded by Nate's words. "Someone's feeling snippy."

He lowers his voice to a gravelly whisper. "Blair still hasn't uncrossed her legs yet, huh?"

When Nate's eyes widen, Chuck immediately realizes that he's broken a clause in their implicit friendship contract. One that states that there are certain things you just can't say out loud.

"Sorry," he says in a mock-conciliatory tone. "I didn't realize it was…" He pauses. "An issue."

Nate's posture relaxes slightly. He looks down at his feet. Nudges a twig off the stairs with his toe.

"Blair's my girlfriend, and Serena's her best friend," he says. "And that's..."

He raises his head, looks off into the distance. Presses his lips together, shakes his head.

"That's just the way it is," he finishes.

#

"Van der Woodsen, I have news," Chuck says a few days later. "You are officially my soul mate."

"In your dreams, Bass," Serena skeptically replies.

She and Blair are sitting on the Met steps. Two lattes and two cups of strawberry yogurt sit by their feet; a copy of the latest _Vogue _is draped over both their laps.

Their minions are nowhere to be found. On Friday afternoons the Met steps are reserved for Blair and Serena alone.

"What are you talking about?" Blair wants to know.

"Gossip Girl just released the superlatives for our class," Chuck reports, sitting down two steps beneath them. "Serena and I won the same category."

"What's that?"

He hands Blair his phone.

"'Most likely to get sent to reform school next year?'" she reads, raising her eyebrows. "How…admirable."

"Ugh, I totally don't deserve that!" Serena protests, taking the phone from Blair. "I guarantee you Deirdre Baizen has an eight ball in her locker right now."

"See, the fact that you know that tells me that there's probably a reason you won," Blair says in a crisp voice, plucking the phone out of Serena's hand again.

"I think it was probably that fountain stunt last weekend that gave you the winning edge," Chuck says, staring off into space as if conjuring up the image in his memory. "It _was _rather memorable. The moonlight glistening on your wet, naked—"

"Shut up, Chuck," Serena warns him. "Did you get anything, Blair?

"Yeah." Blair is looking down at the phone. "'Most likely to get married first.'" A smile quirks the corners of her mouth. "Nate's my male counterpart, of course," she gushes, and girlishly nudges Serena with her shoulder.

"Why are you so happy about that?" Chuck asks with evident distaste. "News flash: people think you're boring."

Twin wrinkles appear between Blair's eyebrows. "I am _not_ boring."

"Not as boring as you pretend to be," he concedes. "All this society princess bullshit. _I _know you better, Waldorf."

"Oh, really?" Blair is unconvinced. "What superlative would _you_ give me?"

Chuck thinks it over for a moment.

"Most likely to become dictator of a small Central American country," he decides.

"Ha!" Blair pretends otherwise, but she is obviously pleased. "Nice try, Bass, but I don't even speak Spanish."

"No matter. I'm sure you're a very cunning linguist…"

The girls groan.

"Go away, Chuck!" they yell in unison.

"Fine," Chuck says, annoyed, and takes his phone from Blair. "Aren't you coming to photo lab?" he says to Serena.

"In a minute, I wanna finish my yogurt," Serena says, stirring it with her spoon.

After a split-second's hesitation, Chuck slings his rucksack over his shoulder and stalks off towards the school, and Blair follows his retreating form with curious, calculating eyes.

She licks her lips. Thinks over her next sentence for a moment or two.

"Aren't you worried Matt's going to find out?" she says to Serena in a low, sly voice.

"Find out what?" Serena says through a mouthful of yogurt, flipping over to the next page of _Vogue_.

"You know." Blair nudges her, drops her voice to its lowest register. "You. Chuck. The darkroom. And I'm not talking about your weekly indulgence in herbal therapy."

Serena's jaw drops. "He _told_ you?"

Blair lets out a little laugh.

"No," she says, triumph in her tone. "But youjustdid."

Serena plants her face into her hands. "How did you figure it out?"

Blair shrugs; licks yogurt off of the back of her spoon. "I dunno. Just a hunch. You'd just better hope that I'm the only one who knows. Because unlike _some people_—" (she shoots Serena a pointed look) "—_I _know how to keep a secret."

She drops her voice again. "Like you _cheating_ on your _boyfriend_. You know—_Matt Archer_?"

"God, Blair, I made out with him, _once_!" Serena protests, unintentionally omitting the incident at Georgina's party. "That doesn't count as cheating."

Blair's eyebrows contort. "In what twisted world does making out not count as cheating? You know what," she interrupts as Serena is opening her mouth, "never mind. Let me ask a far more important question: in what twisted world would you actually _want_ to make out with Chuck Bass?"

"I dunno," Serena replies, uncomfortable. "We were stuck in the darkroom together. We were stoned. We were bored. It was just...something to do."

Blair regards her skeptically.

"Don't look at me like that, Blair."

Blair continues to look at her like that.

"I'm not going to have sex with him."

Blair raises her non-fat sugar-free caramel no-whip latte to her lips.

"I'm _not_!" Serena insists at a higher pitch.

"S, you're playing with fire and you know it." Blair stands up, shaking her head, and starts to gather her things together. "God, I can't believe you're sabotaging your relationship with Matt Archer to swap spit with _Chuck_, of all people."

The disgust in her voice is palpable.

"I'm not sabotaging anything!" Serena angrily retorts, tossing the _Vogue _into her hobo bag. "What we have going on is totally chill."

"Serena, it's _Chuck_," Blair reminds her as they make their way down the stairs. "How long do you really think you're going to be able to keep it PG-rated?"

"What, you think I'm like…unable to resist him? Come on."

"He's the same way with every single girl he goes after," Blair protests. "He doesn't stop harassing them until he gets what he wants. And afterwards, you'd better believe that he'll act like a total pig and pretend it never happened."

They stop and wait for the signal to turn at the crosswalk in front of the Met.

"Don't you even remember Sophie Madison?" Blair asks.

Serena searches her memory. "The virgin?" she guesses.

"The ex-virgin!" Blair cries. "It only took him a week. And she had to ask Harvard for her early decision application essay back, because it was entitled 'Why I'm Waiting, and Why It's a Feminist Choice.'"

"I'm nothing like Sophie Madison, Blair," Serena says with considerable force as they're crossing the street. "Or _you_. I can handle myself."

Blair recoils from her.

"Oh?" she says, eyebrows raised. "Is that why you blew off chem lab last Friday? Because you were _handling_ yourself?" Her voice drops with derision; her eyes narrow. "And here I thought it was because you had a rabid case of the munchies."

Serena sucks in her cheeks, settles into a sullen silence. Begins to walk more briskly, hoping to outpace Blair with her longer legs on the way back to school.

"_Serena_," Blair calls out behind her, and hearing a plaintive note in her voice, Serena sighs and slows down.

Blair raises her hands helplessly and lets them fall again. "I can't believe I even have to say this…but here it is. There is no absolutely way in hell this is going to end well. I mean, Chuck's my friend and all, but he's a total perv. And you two—you two are just _bad _for each other. If you keep carrying on with him, you WILL end up in reform school, and..."

She struggles to formulate her next sentence.

"Blair!" Serena is shocked. "Is that what you're worried about? Honestly—the class superlatives?"

Blair bites her lip. Doesn't say anything.

"They don't mean anything," Serena says, squeezing her shoulder. "I'm _not _going to reform school."

"You'd better not," Blair says sullenly. "You'd better...you know."

She pauses. "Be careful," she says with great emphasis.

It has never been in Serena van Woodsen's disposition to be careful. This is something of which Blair is highly aware. But she is hoping against hope that the words that she's spoken so many times before will finally sink in this time, finally take effect.

But Serena answers her too quickly, too readily.

"I will," she says, as if she's telling the truth, and Blair's face falls, knowing that she isn't.

Suddenly, Nate steps out onto the sidewalk in front of them.

"Oh my God," he says, like he's stunned by some epic coincidence. "It's the two most beautiful girls at school."

Serena smiles at him—naturally, beautifully. Like the sun just dawning over the horizon.

"Hey, Nate," she says softly as he approaches Blair, sets his arm around her shoulders.

"_Nate_!" Blair protests, ducking out from underneath his arm. "You're mussing my curls." She pouts as she pats at her hair with her hand.

Nate turns around and makes a monkey face at Serena behind Blair's back, and she sets her hand over her mouth to hold back a snicker.

"Aren't you running kind of late?" he asks Blair. "I usually don't see you on my way to lunch."

"What?" Blair says, and turns over her wrist to look at her watch. "_Shit_!" she cries, and beelines towards the school entrance.

Nate watches her go, his eyebrows furrowing. "She's so high-strung sometimes," he says with an uncomprehending sigh.

Serena shifts her weight from foot to foot.

She tells herself to say goodbye to Nate. To go back to school, to follow Blair. But there is already a swarm of anguished, ecstatic hormones buzzing through her body—a reaction she has had, without fail, over the past eight months, whenever her best friend's boyfriend is standing within a twenty-foot radius.

"I should go too," she finally says with some effort.

"Don't you have photo lab fifth period Fridays?" Nate asks. "Chuck told me you finished your project last week."

He smiles. "Come have lunch with me," he says, gesturing with his head away from the school. "I could use some company."

Serena looks at Nate, eyes wide, mouth slightly open.

"I..." She swallows. "I can't, Nate. I have to—"

She steadies her bag on her shoulder, takes a few backwards steps away from him. "I really should go," she says.

"Oh, okay," Nate says, trying not to sound disappointed. "Maybe...some other time?"

But Serena's only answer is a regretful smile.

She doesn't make it through the school entrance in time to see Blair's collision with the dark-haired boy at the foot of the grand stairway. Only its aftermath.

"_Ugh!_" Blair is exclaiming in disgust. She looks down at her latte-drenched blazer, and then at the dark-haired boy, who is squatting down in front of her, gathering up his papers from the cobblestones. "When did they start letting ANYONE into this school?"

She tosses her head like a filly and stomps off to the nearest ladies' room.

Serena hurries to catch up with her; hesitates as she's passing by the dark-haired boy. Stops.

"Sorry about my friend," she says to the top of his head. "She's...well. She's…"

"She's a _bitch_," he declares to the ground as he finishes stacking his papers. "That's…yeah. That's what she is," he mutters.

"You just have to get to know her, I guess," Serena offers lamely.

"Yeah, well, I, uh, have absolutely no desire to do that, so…"

He rises to his feet, finally sees the girl he's talking to. His eyes widen in recognition; his mouth drops open.

She raises her eyebrows, waiting for him to speak.

After a prolonged pause, the dark-haired boy finally raises his hand in an awkward salute. "Have a _good one_," he says heartily, and walks from her away very quickly.

What a weird guy, Serena thinks.

#

"Heyyy," Chuck drawls. He is sitting on the floor of the darkroom; he is running his tongue along the seam of a joint. "I wasn't sure you'd show."

"Why wouldn't I?" Serena says as she shuts the door behind her.

Chuck shrugs, toasts the joint with back-and-forth swipes of the lighter. "Maybe because you've been avoiding me all week."

"Have I?"

He lets out a little laugh. "Playing coy isn't your strong suit, Serena."

Serena leans back against the counter. Crosses her arms over her chest.

"Chuck, I was really, really drunk on Saturday night," she begins.

"Is that right," he answers, pulling himself to his feet. He tucks the joint behind his ear; takes a couple of slow, sauntering steps towards her. "What about last Friday?"

"I was stoned," she says. "And bored," she adds for good measure.

He takes another two steps towards her. "What about now?" he says, touching the side of her waist.

Serena curves her body away from his hand like a parenthesis. "Chuck, this isn't a good idea."

"I never claimed it was a good idea," he counters.

"Would you stop being so weird about this?" she says, getting frustrated. "We were just having some fun."

"We could be having a lot more fun."

"I have plenty of fun with Matt, thanks."

"_Really_," Chuck says. The word is heavily ladled with skepticism.

He sets his hands on the counter on either side of her, boxing her in with his arms. He's so close that she can feel the heat of his skin. His expensive cologne whirls in her nose.

She immediately assumes a look of impatience to disguise the way she actually feels. Slightly panicked. Slightly aroused.

Chuck looks into her eyes. "Does he go down on you?" he says in a low purr.

A spark of desire ignites between Serena's thighs. Her lips part; she feels her cheeks flush red-hot.

"_I _do," he continues, steadily gazing at her, and lifts one hand to idly graze his fingertip up the inside of her thigh. "I _like_ doing it."

"Stop it, Chuck," she says in a wary voice as she pushes his hand away.

"Make me," he says, and leans forward to kiss her.

She pushes him away again.

"_Make me,"_ he insists, cradling her face with his hands, and kisses her again.

The spark flares, and, after a moment of external and internal struggle, she yields. Kisses him back with reluctant passion as he presses his body hard against hers.

When he breaks the kiss, they set their foreheads together and let out synchronous sighs.

"Stop thinking about what's a good idea, what's not," he murmurs to her, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. "Do what _you _want to do." He kisses her again. "What we _both _want to do."

As he speaks, an unsettling feeling washes over Serena. She lowers her head; sets her forehead against his shoulder to avoid his gaze.

"Why are you being like this?" she mumbles miserably.

"Like what?" he asks in an even tone. He is already unbuttoning her shirt.

"Like we're not even friends."

His fingers falter on a button, and stop. "Of course we're friends," he says.

"Then why are you treating me like you barely know me?" she says. There is pain in her voice. "It's like everything between us changed the moment you decided you could fuck me."

Chuck's expression immediately changes. His face suddenly looks younger, uncharacteristically so.

"That's not—" he starts to say.

He flounders for his next words for a moment.

"I just thought—" he tries again, with no more success than before.

He falls silent, and for a moment Serena feels almost sorry for him, because he really does look confused.

"Thought what?" she prods him.

"That…" He licks his lips. "We _get_ each other."

He shrugs. "We know how to keep sex separate from everything else. We don't have hang-ups, like other people do. We know how to let loose. Have fun."

He leans forward to kiss her neck, whispers against her skin: "Let's just have some fun, okay?"

It's the sadness in his voice that finally seduces her. Because she knows that he knows in his heart of hearts that it's not "just some fun."

Intoxication is not the same thing as fun. It doesn't make you feel good. It just keeps out all the bad, for a little while.

Coming home to a quiet apartment. Her mother gone, her brother locked in his bedroom. The predatory eyes of the men passing her by in the street. The exasperated looks on her teachers' faces when she tells them she left the homework assignment in her locker again.

Blair rolling her eyes at something improper she's said.

Midnight on her birthday, and her father hasn't called.

Every step she takes away from Nate.

Serena sighs in comprehension, in sadness, in relief. Her arms encircle Chuck's body, her hands clench the fabric of his shirt behind his shoulder blades.

"Okay," she whispers to him, and then his mouth is on hers again.

"Just...promise you won't tell anyone," she says as he finishes unbuttoning her shirt, pushes the white cotton fabric aside, pulls her towards him by the waist. His hands are burning hot against the coolness of her flesh.

"Okay," he says, bending down to kiss her just beneath the collarbone. His hands slip under the cups of her bra; his fingertips gently massage the nipples crowning her breasts.

She closes her eyes, wanting to relish this moment of forgetting. "Not even Nate," she says in a soft, breathy voice.

"...Okay," he says again, but this time she catches the hesitation in his voice, and her eyes snap open.

"Did you already tell him?" she says with a tinge of panic, pulling back to look at him.

"_No," _he exclaims, letting his hands fall away from her."Why? What do you care?"

"I don't."

"Good," he throws back.

They are still looking at each other suspiciously when they hear a shuffling noise outside the darkroom, and then a series of sharp knocks upon the door.

"We've got the darkroom until sixth," Chuck yells towards the door.

"Mr. Rosenthal told us we could use it," says a contrary voice outside.

"Well, he's full of shit. This is our hour."

"Uh, well," says another voice, a male one, after a short pause. "He told us that you already turned in your last project and he's pretty sure you're, quote, 'just putzing around in there,' end quote. But I could go ask him to give us the key, if you want."

Chuck looks at Serena and expels a frustrated sigh.

"Skip the rest of the day," he pleads. "I'll text Arthur to come pick us up."

Serena shakes her head. "I have to go to chem lab, Chuck. It's so not even negotiable."

"Then come over tonight."

"I can't," she throws back. "I'm sleeping over at Blair's."

"Tell her something came up."

Serena shakes her head again.

"Why not?"

"Because she'll know _why, that's why_."

Another series of knocks at the door, and she barely even notices. The way that Chuck is looking at her right now makes her feel ashamed. But ashamed of what? Choosing Blair over him?

"You _told her_?" he says, incredulous.

"Of course not!" Serena is quick to return. "She just...figured it out. You know how she is."

Chuck runs his hand over his face. "Saturday night, then. After the—"

But Serena is already shaking her head again. "I'm going with Matt," she says.

"God-fucking-dammit, Serena," Chuck says, plainly out of patience. "Just dump him already. You don't even _like _him."

"HEY," says the voice outside. "ANY DAY NOW."

"We're coming out now, ASSHOLE!" Chuck yells back. "Keep your fucking shirt on."

He looks at Serena, who is quickly re-buttoning her shirt. For a moment it seems as though he's going to say something, but he doesn't. Just slings his bag over his shoulder and opens the door.

The dark-haired boy and a bespectacled girl are waiting in the hallway.

"Your majesties," Chuck says to them venomously, flourishing his arm towards the darkroom.

"Thank you," the dark-haired boy says icily.

As he walks out of the darkroom, Chuck hits his shoulder hard against the dark-haired boy's. A camera hits the floor behind him with an ugly _clank_.

"Sorry," Chuck says over his shoulder lazily, not sounding remotely sorry, and continues down the hallway.

The dark-haired boy sighs, and bends down to pick up his camera. The lens is still intact, but the impact has caused its back panel to crack open, exposing the strip of negative to light.

"Sorry about that," Serena says, lingering behind. "Chuck—well. He's just—"

"An asshole," the dark-haired boy says, locking the panel back into place. "That's what he is."

He looks up at her. "Oh, it's—"

He stands up; coughs. "It's you. You, uh...you always go around apologizing for your friends?"

"No," Serena replies. She thinks for a moment, and then lets out a self-deprecating laugh. "Actually, it's usually the other way around," she admits.

"Huh," the dark-haired boy says. "Y'know, I find that—um. Kinda hard to believe."

He stands there, looking at her, and Serena sees herself reflected in his eyes. Her image is floating, suspended in space. Like a girl he's imagining into existence.

Beside him, Nelly Yuki clears her throat impatiently.

He opens his mouth and points at the darkroom door. "We're just going to—" He presses his lips together. "Yeah."

And with that, he disappears into the darkroom.

#

When Serena comes out of the bathroom stall, Blair is retouching her mascara at the mirror, dotting the wand down onto her lower lashes.

"I missed a pop quiz in Pre-Cal," she informs Serena in a glum voice. "My six-week average will probably drop to a B+."

She shudders.

Serena, for whom a B+ would be a godsend, doesn't reply right away. She turns on the faucet, squirts soap into her palms.

"I'm sure you can strong-arm Ms. Thompson into a retake," she finally tells her. "You are Blair Waldorf, after all."

A smile plays around Blair's mouth for a moment. "Hmm," she hums in acknowledgment.

Then her eyes flick up to Serena's face reflected in the mirror.

"So," she says. "How was Chuck in photo lab? Has he found some other poor girl to harass yet?"

She leans forward, applies mascara to her other set of eyelashes. "Or is he still stuck on you?"

Bubbles emerge between Serena's fingers as she rubs her hands together. She stares down at them. Considers how to answer.

What is she supposed to say to Blair? Oh, our mutual friend Chuck? I'm planning on fucking him as soon as possible. Not because I like him, not because I have any romantic interest in him, not even because I don't believe every single word that you've said about him, because I do.

As much as I hate to admit it, you tend to be right about this kind of thing. You know how people are. You know their weaknesses.

But you don't know me. Because if you did, you'd turn your back on me and never look back. The truth is that I'm fucked up. I know you don't believe it, Blair. I know you think I'm Sunshine Barbie. But I'm not.

Because whenever I'm around your boyfriend, I'm thinking about fucking him. And Chuck is the only guy I know who might actually be able to make me forget about Nate, make me forget about my family—sorry, my _non-family, _my_ pretense _of a family.

Make me forget about how to get from party to party, from weekend to weekend, without completely falling apart.

Not that you would know anything about that, B. Now would you?

"Oh," Serena hears herself say. "I told him I thought it was a bad idea…and that was that."

She finishes drying her hands. Balls up the paper towel and tosses it into the trash.

Blair raises her eyebrows. "And he was cool with it?"

"Uh, yeah," Serena says. She is looking at herself in the mirror, fluffing her hair with her fingers. "I told you. It was a total non-event."

Blair blinks twice. Then she reaches out and begins to unbutton Serena's shirt.

"B, what are you d—" Serena cuts herself off when she realizes that Blair is, in fact, _re_-buttoning her shirt. Straightening it. With each button matching the buttonhole opposite.

Blair finishes and looks up at her, her brown eyes all-knowing. "You were saying?" she asks.

It's impossible for Serena to tell which makes her feel worse. The disappointment in Blair's voice, or its complete lack of surprise.

"I'm not going to tell you I told you so," Blair says.

"Well. You kind of just did, B," Serena bitterly replies.

Blair shakes her head. "No. I meant when this comes back to bite you in the ass. Which it will."

"You know what, Blair?" Serena shoots back after a loaded pause. "Let's play a game. It's called 'you mind your own business, and I'll mind mine.'"

She slings her bag over her shoulder and stalks out of the bathroom, and Blair stares after her for a moment or two.

Then reaches into her purse and pulls out her phone.

#

When the blast drops twenty minutes later, Chuck is sitting in European History. He is thinking about Serena—or, more accurately, he is thinking about her body, and what he is going to do to it as soon as he gets her alone and flat on her back.

He is pulling off her panties. Running his hands up her thighs.

Chuck sticks his thumb in the corner of his mouth, bites it between his molars. His eyes glaze over. Somewhere far away, the teacher is lecturing about 18th century military equipment.

He is going down on her. She is writhing underneath him, her thighs jostling against the sides of his face.

His phone _brrngs _in his pocket, jolting him back to reality. Everyone in the class bends down to examine their cells in synchrony.

**Constance-B's It-girl has only been dating Matt Archer a couple of weeks, but she's already fooling around on the sly. Serena Van der Woodsen...or Venereal disease for-Good-sen? You decide!**

Chuck fights to keep his face neutral.

"Yo, Bass!" Quinn turns around, lifts his phone up to display the screen. "This has gotta be you, right?"

"...What?" Chuck replies, as if he's a bit slow on the uptake. It is a strategical move. He needs a few extra seconds to think, and Quinn is far too stupid to notice that he's stalling.

"Come on. I saw the way you two were acting on Saturday night."

Around the room, several pairs of eyes are staring at Chuck, awaiting his answer.

Chuck considers what to do. Should he dodge the question? Opt for a categorical denial?

An image of Serena flashes in his memory.

"Promise you won't tell anyone," she said as he opened her shirt, revealed her lacy black bra, her gorgeous breasts.

Categorical denial it is.

Chuck shrugs one shoulder and curls his lip, as if to express how much the subject bores him. He does this exaggeratedly—he needs to look like he's putting on a front.

"Nahhh," he says slowly, tracing his finger around his cuff-link. "She says we're better off as friends."

It is the voice of a boy who has been rejected, and knows it.

"All right, is everyone up to speed on the latest scandal yet?" the teacher asks the class. His tone clearly indicates that he couldn't be more over this shit. "For the five hundredth millionth time, no cell phones in class, people."

Quinn, looking almost disappointed, turns back around, and Chuck knows that his act has been sufficiently credible. He is not exactly pleased by this. Under normal circumstances, he would never sully his reputation with this nonsense.

But Serena Van der Woodsen's tits are not normal circumstances. Nowhere near, in fact.

His phone _brrngs_ again, and he checks it under his desk. It's her.

**Secret spot.**

Chuck texts her back immediately.

**Okay.**

"Mr. Bass. For the five hundredth millionth and one-th time, no cell phones in class, please."

Chuck stretches in his chair, arms overhead, the very picture of indolence.

"_Okay_," he says through a yawn. "Hey, can I go to the bathroom?"

#

As soon as she steps through the heavy metal door to the boiler room, Serena holds up her phone at him. Her eyes are like blue ice.

"Hey, don't worry," Chuck says in an assuaging tone. "I've already put all the rumors to rest."

He is expecting a positive response. Maybe even an immediate resumption of their earlier activities. But Serena just stares at him.

"No one knows it's me," Chuck explains, far less cheerfully than before. "No one's even going to suspect. I practically issued a press release."

Serena blinks. "Are you seriously going to pretend like you had nothing to do with this?" She waves her phone at him.

Chuck's face instantly clouds over.

"You think _I s_ent it?" he replies, incredulous. "Serena, I didn't say anything, to _anyone_. Hell, you're the one who ran off and told _Blair_. Who, by the way, is the only other person who knows about this."

He shrugs angrily. "Put two and two together already."

"_No_," Serena declares. "Blair wouldn't do this to me."

"The fuck she wouldn't," Chuck immediately replies.

"She had no reason to!" she cries. "You're the only one who stands to gain _anything_ from this."

"What doI possibly standto gain from Gossip Girl calling you a slut? So far the only thing it's brought me is you yelling at me for no reason."

"Oh, so this is just some amazing coincidence," Serena returns with a roll of her eyes. "It just _happened_ to happen, the week you made it your life's mission to have sex with me. Or are you going to deny that too?"

Chuck stares at her for a moment before heaving out a sigh.

"All right," he concedes. "I admit that the prospect holds a certain...appeal." His eyes involuntarily glide over her chest. "But that doesn't give me any reason to break up you and Matt Archer. You were going to have sex with me anyways. You made that _abundantly _clear."

His voice drops. "You probably would have fucked me in the darkroom if that _prole _hadn't interrupted us..."

Serena hesitates. "You must have wanted...like, some long term thing."

Chuck snorts. "Please. You forget who you're talking to."

"Or maybe you just didn't want any more interruptions—how should I know?" Serena is getting flustered. "Either way, my boyfriend's going to read this, and by the time school's over, I'm not going to _have_ a boyfriend anymore. Or even a date for this weekend. So thanks, Chuck. Thanks a lot for that."

He rolls his eyes. "You _wanted_ to get rid of him. You should be _thanking_ whoever sent in that blast. Not pretending like you're all upset over losing your second rate Nate. "

Serena is taken aback. "What is _that_ supposed to mean?"

Chuck raises his eyebrows at her. "What?" he says with sordid amusement. "You think I don't notice the way you look at him when Blair's not around?"

He lets out a ugly little laugh. "You'd fuck him in a heartbeat if you had the chance."

"I would _never_ do that," Serena says, both angered and dismayed.

"Yes you would."

"How do you know?" she challenges him. "How do _you _know what_ I_ would do?"

"Because you're just like me!" he half-yells.

"I am NOTHING like you!" she yells. "All you do is manipulate everyone around you. You manipulate _me_. God—you're worse than _Blair._"

She shakes her head at him. "She's right about you, you know," she insists. "She sees you for exactly what you are. A _pig_."

Chuck stares at her for a second.

"A_ pig_," he repeats. "_I'm_ a pig."

Serena stares him down, affirming this preposition through her silence.

"Huh." Chuck pauses, purses his lips thoughtfully. "So tell me, Serena: what does that make you?"

When she is silent, he continues. "Well, I'd say it makes you a _sow_." His voice drops to an insinuating rasp. "Because as much as you hate to admit it, you certainly love rolling around in the mud with _me_."

He grabs her by the waist. She tries to push him away, but he holds tight.

"Stop it," she cries, and tries to push him away again.

"Not until you admit that we. Are exactly. The _same_," he insists as she thrashes in his arms.

She throws her elbows so wildly that he is forced to release her. Then she stares at him for a moment, panting, before taking one big step towards him and shoving him down to the ground.

By that point he's not even touching her anymore, but Serena is too furious to care.

Chuck looks up at her from the filthy concrete floor. Lifts his hand up from a damp patch and shakes it off with great disgust.

"_Fine_," he says, slathering the word with spite.

He picks himself up with as much dignity as possible—which isn't much, given the circumstances. "You're _not _like me, Serena. You know what you are?"

Serena crosses her arms over her chest. Clenches her jaw.

"You're one of those girls who peaks in high school and then ages twice as fast as everyone else," Chuck tells her, brushing the dust off his shirtsleeves. "You'll have snorted your entire trust fund up your nose by the time you turn thirty. And then you'll marry a series of rich assholes and divorce them one by one."

His eyes are burning with a wicked light. "Just like your slut mother."

Serena recoils from him. Tears spring into her eyes.

"At least I _have_ a mother," she throws back at him in scorn. "You don't have anyone—except for your father, who can barely even stand you. And you're never _going_ to have anyone, because your little bad boy act is going to get real old, real fast. Sure—" (she shrugs) "—ten years from now, Blair and Nate will invite you over for Thanksgiving and Christmas. But only because they pity you, not because they actually want you there. And as soon as you leave, they'll be relieved that their charity for the year is finally over."

The room falls silent, and Chuck and Serena stare at each other, shaken. Almost unable to comprehend how adept they are at wounding one another.

Serena compresses her mouth and shakes her head. Her eyes are still glistening with unshed tears.

"God, I wish I never had to look at you again," she says.

"I'll see you this _weekend_," Chuck throws back at her in anger.

She is already halfway to the door, but she still turns and looks at him over her shoulder.

Off her look of incredulity, he scoffs. "Oh, _right_. Like you're really going to miss the Shepard wedding."

#

"It's okay, S," Blair says into the phone. "You don't have to go stag...you can just tag along with me and Nate." There is a pause. "Are you kidding?" she says brightly. "There are a million guys out there who would _die_ to be your date. I'm sure one of them will show up Saturday night. Besides...let's face it." Her tone is begrudging, yet cheerful. "Matt Archer was totally boring."

"He was, wasn't he?" Serena says after a little amused noise. "And kissing him was like kissing a goldfish. All cold and wet and..._EUGH_!"

The girls laugh together, then trail off into silence.

Blair hesitates. "You...haven't set your sights on anyone else, have you?"

"You mean like Chuck?" Serena huffs into the phone. "No."

There is a finality in her tone that Blair is pleased to hear.

"Well, I really do think it's for the best," she hurriedly replies. "I mean—_you two_?" She laughs again. "You're really better off as friends."

"Mm. That's just it, B," Serena replies in a lower voice, a sadder one. She is lying in her bed, her face pressed against her pillow. "We had a fight, and..."

She sighs. "I'm not sure we're friends anymore."

Blair swallows. "You've still got me," she offers.

"I know," she hears Serena sigh in answer. "Love you, B."

"Love you too, S."

Blair ends the call. Closes her eyes and breathes out through her nose.

"Hey," Nate says with a hint of concern. He is sitting beside Blair on his bed; their math textbooks are lying open in front of them. "Is Serena feeling any better?"

When Blair doesn't answer, his brows knit. "Blair?" he asks, sounding almost scared. "What's the matter?"

"Nate…" Blair pauses, folds her hands in her lap. "Let's said you had this friend. And they were doing something that wasn't good for them. But when you tried to explain to them why it wasn't good for them, they totally blew you off. And then you figured out a way to stop them from doing...that thing. But you kind of had to trick them, a little…"

She stops and looks up at him, searching his face for signs of understanding.

"Uh...Blair?" Nate says. "You've lost me."

She sighs.

"Hey," he says, pushing back her hair from her forehead. "It sounds like you did what you thought was best. Because you wanted to help someone else. Right?"

"...Right," she says after some hesitation.

"Well, then. How can that be wrong?"

Blair pouts. "I just feel icky," she says.

He puts his arm around her, strokes her back. "You're a good person, Blair. And you've got a good heart. You know that, right?" He kisses her temple.

"I guess," she utters without much faith.

"Hey," he says with a little smile, gliding his fingertips down her cheek to her chin. "Come here."

He leans forward and kisses her—gently at first. Then his hands slide down her back to her hips, and his kisses quickly grow more ardent.

"Mmm," he murmurs against her mouth. He pulls her on top of him, begins to tug at her shirt. He is trying to pull it over her head.

Blair stiffens.

It is far too bright in the bedroom. If Nate pulls off her shirt now, he'll see the protuberance of her stomach, the fat deposits under her arms.

He'll see what she's really like underneath her clothes.

Her hands shoot out to grab his hands. She clutches them, arrests their motion.

Nate freezes. Looks up at her with questioning eyes.

"I'm sorry," she breathes out. "I'm just...I'm not ready."

He takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly.

"Is that all right?" she adds, worried.

"Of course it's all right," Nate answers. "I mean—it's like I've always said. We should wait till we're both ready."

Blair looks down at him, her eyes soft and grateful.

Beside them on the bedspread, her cell phone starts to ring.

"Oh, sorry!" she chirps to him, and plucks up her phone very quickly. "I really should take this call."

She rolls off of him, slides off the bed, and takes a few steps away. She sets the phone to her ear.

"Charlene Bates from the Circle Club!" she crows into the receiver. "I am so sorry that I missed your call earlier."

"The hell you are, Waldorf," Chuck says in a dry tone. "What's with the alias? Are you and Nathaniel on one of your little study dates again?"

"As a matter of fact, I am," Blair answers with a smile, as if the fictional Mrs. Bates has just inquired about her health. "Thank you so much for asking."

She glances in the mirror over the fireplace. Nate is still within earshot, sitting on the bed behind her. He is flipping through his geometry book with an expression that she would think were disappointed, if she didn't know him better.

He doesn't look like he's paying her any attention at all.

Still, she thinks. Better to be careful.

"Look, I know you sent in that blast," Chuck tells her in a tone that anticipates denial. "Serena may not believe it, but I know you. And this has your name written all over it."

"Oh, I'm so happy to hear that you liked my seating plan," Blair effuses, setting her hand to her heart. "I just couldn't stop working on it. Not until I was satisfied that everyone was arranged in the best possible way. You know—certain people close together...certain people far apart..."

"So you _admit _this was your plan?" Chuck asks, hardly believing the confession he is hearing. "To keep me and Serena apart?

"Well..." Blair switches to a diplomatic tone. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I have heard of your interest in my best friend. But I have to tell you...Serena won't be joining the Circle Club anytime soon. Her schedule simply won't allow her take on yet another social obligation."

"More like her best friend won't allow her to have her own fucking life."

"I'm afraid you'll simply have to set your sights on someone else," Blair says with feigned sympathy. "But I'm sure finding a new junior member won't pose any problems. After all, your club is so very...exclusive."

"You know what I can't figure out, Waldorf?" Chuck says crossly. "How you benefit from _any _of this. I mean, do you just like playing with Serena like she's your own life-sized Barbie doll?"

"No, that would be you, Mrs. Bates," Blair says with an icy smile. "Remember?"

"Or maybe..." Chuck trails off, mulls for a moment. "Maybe it's just your ingrained Puritanism. Maybe you're just an uptight little virgin who doesn't want anyone else to get laid, either."

"Hmm. You know, I'm not sure we're seeing eye to eye to this..."

"Look, Blair—I didn't go after Serena. She came after _me_. And why? Because she wanted to have some fun. Something you are clearly incapable of doing." He blows a frustrated breath into the receiver. "I mean, why did you have to mix yourself up in this in the first place? Why couldn't you have just left us the fuck alone?"

"No, no, Mrs. Bates. Let me stop you right there," Blair says with some force. "It's not that _Serena's too good for you_ or anything." (She emphasizes each word, clearly implying the opposite.) "It's just not a good fit."

"Surely you can understand that," she finishes, her voice sickly-sweet.

There is a pause.

"Fuck you, Waldorf."

Then the line goes dead.

"Always a pleasure, Mrs. Bates," Blair says. "Toodles."

She presses the "end" button with her thumb and tosses back her hair. And catches sight of something unexpected on the mantelpiece.

She blinks.

"What's this?" she asks in a small voice.

After a few seconds of silence, Nate looks up from his geometry book. Realizes that Blair is now talking to him.

"Oh!" he says with a start. He hops off the bed, walks over to join her.

"Isn't it great?" he says in overt admiration. "Chuck gave it to me last week. He said he and Serena made it in photo lab."

"You don't 'make' a photograph," Blair says absently, staring at the photo in its sterling silver frame. "You develop it."

Nate shrugs good-naturedly. "Yeah, you know. Whatever."

Blair's eyes glide over the picture, over the young faces of her and her friends.

Serena is standing next to her, smiling her biggest, brightest smile. Nate is leaning into her, a modest expression on his face. She is dead center, wrapping his scarf around her.

Chuck is standing behind her and Serena, his head tucked over their shoulders.

_You two sure you don't wanna make out?_ she remembers him saying a second after the picture was taken. She and Serena had turned around and slapped him upside the head. And everyone had laughed.

"We all look so...inseparable," Blair says almost sadly, tracing her finger over the glass.

Nate looks surprised by this.

"That's 'cause _we are_," he says with complete conviction. "I mean—"

He lets out a little sigh. "I know you don't always get along with Chuck...and you and Serena have your differences every now and then," he qualifies. "But we always work it out. We always come back together in the end."

Blair looks at Nate for a moment. There is tenderness in her eyes.

She takes a quick step towards him and hugs him tight in her arms.

"Whoa," he says, startled. "What was that for?"

"Love you, Nate Archibald," Blair says with fierce pride, snuggling into his chest. "Always have. Always will."

"Love you too, Blair," he returns softly, and rests his chin on the top of her head.

In answer, she hugs him harder. Basks in his embrace, in the strength of his arms.

But over her head, out of her sight, Nate's eyes have already returned to the photo. To Serena's smiling face.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Thanks as always to Maribells for betaing. Please, M, for both of our sakes, never write a fanfic chapter as long as this one.**

**Would love your reviews, guys. I put a lot of work into this one.**


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